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Unlock the potential of public-private partnerships in education. This groundbreaking study offers fresh empirical evidence on the effectiveness and cost of various educational models in developing countries across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Delve into rigorous case studies examining voucher programs and faith-based schools, uncovering key insights into school performance, targeting, and cost-effectiveness. Discover how these partnerships impact student achievement, literacy, and numeracy, and learn what factors drive success or failure. Emerging Evidence on Vouchers and Faith-Based Providers in Education is essential reading for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners seeking innovative solutions to improve educational outcomes and promote social mobility in developing nations. Explore the challenges and opportunities of these partnerships and gain a deeper understanding of how to create more effective and equitable education systems.

Public-private partnerships in education: an overview / Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Harry Anthony Patrinos, and Quentin Wodon -- The effectiveness of franchises and independent private schools in Chile's national voucher program / Gregory Elacqua, Dante Contreras, and Felipe Salazar -- Cognitive ability, heterogeneity, endogeneity and returns to schooling in Chile: outcomes of the 1981 capitation grant scheme / Harry Anthony Patrinos and Chris Sakellariou -- When schools are the ones that choose: the effect of screening in Chile / Dante Contreras, Sebastian Bustos, and Paulina Sepulveda -- How do vouchers work?: evidence from Colombia / Eric Bettinger, Michael Kremer, and Juan E. Saavedra -- The performance of decentralized school systems: evidence from Fe y Alegría in Venezuela / Hunt Allcott and Daniel E. Ortega -- Literacy and numeracy in faith-based and government schools in Sierra Leone / Quentin Wodon and Yvonne Ying -- Comparing faith-based and government schools in the Democratic Republic of Congo / Prospere Backiny-Yetna and Quentin Wodon -- Student achievement in religious and secular secondary schools in Bangladesh / Mohammad Niaz Asadullah, Nazmul Chaudhury and Amit Dar -- Does money matter?: the effect of private educational expenditures on academic performance / Changhui Kang -- Comparing the cost of public, religious, and private schooling in Cameroon / Prospere Backiny-Yetna and Quentin Wodon.

This chapter illustrates the lack of available data that impedes the analysis of education in India in general, and of private and public schools in particular. In spite of recent developments in the education sector, the official data collection exercise on schools still only collects information on the so-called “recognized” schools. Large numbers of private schools are left out of the official data, as many of them are “unrecognized.” The first section of the chapter presents evidence on the relative sizes of private, aided, and government schooling sectors in India. The second section examines the relative effectiveness and per-pupil costs of private and public schools in India, and the final section discusses India’s experience with public–private partnerships in education.

This thematic study discusses strategies for sustainable financing of secondary education in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report provides insight into options for financing the expansion of secondary education and training in Africa. This comes with a hefty price tag and points to the need to undertake fundamental reforms swiftly. This publication messages are clear: secondary education and training in Sub-Saharan Africa faces the challenge of improved efficiency and improved quality simultaneously with a fast growing demand. Sustainable financing will also require more effective public-private partnerships, because governments have many priorities and do not have a lot of room for significant additional public funding of post-primary systems. Educational reforms are needed to expand enrollment in secondary schooling in affordable ways. These reforms will contribute to poverty reduction by increasing the levels of knowledge, skills, and capability; diminishing inequalities in access that limit social mobility and skew income distribution; and contributing to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that relate to education.

The locus coeruleus (LC) is a region in the brainstem that produces noradrenaline and is involved in both normal and pathological brain function. Pupillometry, the measurement of pupil diameter, provides a powerful readout of LC activity in rodents, primates and humans. The protocol detailed here describes a miniaturized setup that can screen LC activity in rodents in real-time and can be established within 1–2 d. Using low-cost Raspberry Pi computers and cameras, the complete custom-built system costs only ~300 euros, is compatible with stereotaxic surgery frames and seamlessly integrates into complex experimental setups. Tools for pupil tracking and a user-friendly Pupillometry App allow quantification, analysis and visualization of pupil size. Pupillometry can discriminate between different, physiologically relevant firing patterns of the LC and can accurately report LC activation as measured by noradrenaline turnover. Pupillometry provides a rapid, non-invasive readout that can be used to verify accurate placement of electrodes/fibers in vivo, thus allowing decisions about the inclusion/exclusion of individual animals before experiments begin. Pupil diameter is measured in rodents using low-cost cameras and a Raspberry Pi computer to obtain a rapid, noninvasive real-time readout of locus coeruleus activity.

What determines where to move the eyes? We recently showed that pupil size, a well-established marker of effort, also reflects the effort associated with making a saccade (‘saccade costs’). Here, we demonstrate saccade costs to critically drive saccade selection: when choosing between any two saccade directions, the least costly direction was consistently preferred. Strikingly, this principle even held during search in natural scenes in two additional experiments. When increasing cognitive demand experimentally through an auditory counting task, participants made fewer saccades and especially cut costly directions. This suggests that the eye-movement system and other cognitive operations consume similar resources that are flexibly allocated among each other as cognitive demand changes. Together, we argue that eye-movement behavior is tuned to adaptively minimize saccade-inherent effort. On average, we move our eyes three times per second. Where we decide to look next is one of the most frequent choices that our brains make, but how does the brain know where to look? Previous work has established that we tend to look towards elements that ‘pop out’ visually, are relevant for our goals, or places that have previously provided us with information. However, a lot of eye movement behavior cannot be explained by these factors. Koevoet, Strauch et al. wanted to better understand how our brains decide where to look next. The researchers hypothesized that the ‘cost’ of eye movements (the brain has to compute the visual consequences of the eyes moving in a certain way) might influence where we look. To save resources, more ‘affordable’ eye movements may be preferred over costly ones. To test this hypothesis, Koevoet, Strauch et al. measured the effort of eye movements by looking at the pupil size before an eye movement is made. A larger pupil size indicates more effort is required to prepare the movement. The measurements showed that the cost of eye movements depended on the direction of the eye movement, and that affordable ones were chosen over more costly ones. These findings indicate that effort drives where eyes move, supporting the more general idea that the brain is highly efficient with its resources. Koevoet, Strauch et al.’s experiments show that cost predicts where the eyes will move. Future studies should explore where and how the brain stores and uses this information to make decisions, and how cost is integrated with other established factors that drive where we look.

BackgroundGender disparities in vision impairment (VI) among Chinese children and adolescents persist over time. Assessment and prediction of secular trends and the disease burden associated with this disparity can optimise vision health practices.MethodsWe analysed data from the 2005, 2010, 2014 and 2019 Chinese National Surveys on Students Constitution and Health (CNSSCH), which included 874 640 students aged 7–18 years. Regional environmental factors comprised the Price Constant Index (PCI), health worker density, greenery coverage, intensity of light at night, annual patent grants of three kinds, population density, climate and air quality. Trends in VI burden were assessed and predicted using Chinese standard population and WHO population estimates. Mixed-effects models were employed to evaluate sex-based disparities in regional environmental factors and VI prevalence.ResultsMale VI patients have surpassed females, with the gender disparity increasing from −8797.9 thousand in 2005 to 5941.9 thousand in 2030. The PCI (β=0, p=0), greenery coverage (β=0, p=0), intensity of light at night (β=0, p=0) and annual patent grants of three kinds (β=0, p<0) were positively associated with VI prevalence. Stronger associations were observed between VI in male and both PCI (male: β=0, p=0.; female: β=0, p=0) and annual patent grants of three kinds (male: β=0, p<0; female: β=0, p<0).ConclusionsIn China, VI is more prevalent in females, yet the absolute number of patients is larger in males, with this disparity progressively increasing. Males demonstrate heightened susceptibility to regional environmental factors. These findings support incorporating sex-specific prevention measures into current vision protection policies.

Speech perception shows substantial individual differences, but the mechanisms underlying this variability during real-time accent adaptation in natural conversation remain poorly understood. We used pupillometry to examine the temporal dynamics of processing effort while German listeners followed a semi-natural dialogue alternating between Standard German and an Alemannic regional variety of German. Growth curve analysis of the within-trial time course revealed switching costs and initial asymmetries, with greater effort for the regional variety and for switches from standard to regional accent. An analysis across the course of the dialogue further showed that the effect of accent driving these asymmetries diminished as listeners adapted to the regional variety. In contrast, switching costs remained stable across the dialogue, consistent with sustained attentional demands. Individual differences modulated these effects. A k-means cluster analysis yielded two clusters of listeners. The group characterized by greater exposure to Standard German, younger age, lower openness, and more favorable comprehensibility and pleasantness ratings for the standard speaker showed higher switching asymmetry, while overall switching costs did not differ reliably between profiles. These results are consistent with the interpretation that switching cost and switching asymmetry may reflect partly distinct underlying processes and that individual differences in language experience and personality selectively shape asymmetries during adaptation to within-first-language accent variation in real-time conversation.

The children born since the end of the postwar baby boom are the first in American history to come primarily from small families-families of three or fewer children. Judith Blake calls this momentous change the sibsize revolution, and this book focuses on the cognitive and educational consequences to children of families of different sizes. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Impairment of cognitive performance is often observed in time-on tasks. Theoretical considerations suggest that especially prefrontal cortex cognitive control functions is affected by time-on-task effects, but the role of effort/task engagement is not understood. We examine time-on-task effects in cognitive control on a neurophysiological level using a working-memory modulated response inhibition task and inter-relate prefrontal neuroanatomical region-specific theta-band activity with pupil diameter data using EEG-beamforming approaches. We show that task performance declines with time-on tasks, which was paralleled by a concomitant decreases of task-evoked superior frontal gyrus theta-band activity and a reduction in phasic pupil diameter modulations. A strong relation between cognitive control-related superior frontal theta-band activity and effort/task engagement indexed by phasic pupil diameter modulations was observed in the beginning of the experiment, especially for tasks requiring inhibitory controls and demanding high working memory. This strong relation vanished at the end of the experiment, suggesting a decoupling of cognitive control resources useable for a task and effort invested that characterizes time-on-task effects in prefrontal cortical structures.