Foundational skills

Foundational skills can be thought of as the rungs on a ladder that lead to future life outcomes. Source: Abadzi Helen

Acquisition of foundational skills receives widespread attention because human learning is a cumulative process. This is a result of how working memory and long-term memory interact. Working memory has a very limited capacity for actively processing new knowledge, but this capacity expands greatly when building on knowledge that has previously been incorporated into long-term memory.[5][6] A foundation of prior knowledge in long-term memory enables children to use their working memory to build new knowledge on top of this foundation. In other words, mastery of foundational skills is critical to unlocking children's ability to access more complex content.[7]

A useful metaphor to consider is to think of foundational skills as rungs on a ladder that leads to important outcomes later in life, such as higher education and gainful employment.[8] For the ladder to function effectively, it must have enough rungs in place to enable someone to climb it safely and make progress on their learning journey. Here and there, a missing rung or two will not compromise progress overall. However, large gaps will prevent upward movement completely. As the critical lower rungs on the ladder, foundational skills enable further education. Without a firm grasp on these skills, children will struggle to understand concepts that are more complex, and are unlikely to progress to higher-order learning.[1] In a similar vein, foundational skills have been likened to the foundations of a skyscraper, without which further learning cannot take place:

"[Failing to prioritize the development of foundational skills over other learning objectives] is a bit of an invitation to build a skyscraper not from the foundation up, but by placing windows, doors, and roof mid-air, in defiance of gravity."

— Girindre Beeharry, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [9]

The fact that a lack of foundational skills hinders future learning is evidenced by vast amounts of data on the global learning crisis—the reality that while the majority of children around the world attend school, a large proportion of them are not learning. For example, a World Bank study found that "53 percent of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school."[10] Additionally, across seven low- and middle-income countries that participated in PISA for Development, only 12 percent of children who were tested met minimum proficiency levels for math, and just 23 percent for reading.[11]

There are a multitude of reasons why children in education systems around the world are not learning, such as curricula being too fast-paced relative to students' actual learning pace, misalignment between what examinations test for and what curricula aim to teach children, and teachers being too under-skilled and under-supported to provide high quality teaching in the classroom.[12] However, the outcome is the same: children fail to conceptually and procedurally master foundational skills, which impedes future learning progress and causes them to fall behind. This is especially true of children who fall within the bottom tercile of their class in terms of current learning levels (i.e., children who are the farthest behind their peers).[13]

Children failing to acquire foundational skills has several negative implications on their lives. Firstly, children's learning levels are massively predictive of the number of years of schooling they will complete, indicating that low learners are more likely to drop out of school entirely than their peers.[14] A recent mixed methods study finds both a strong quantitative association between low learning and later dropout in Kenya, and were able to trace back the underlying reason for dropout to low learning through interviews with parents and students.[15] The rationale for this is fairly straightforward. When children and/or parents realize how little a child is actually learning in school, the opportunity cost of sending that child to school reaches a point where it is no longer an attractive option. In some cases, children may exercise agency in the decision of whether or not to remain in school, while in other cases, parents may make this decision.[16]

This is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, qualitative research also shows that low learning, due to a lack of mastery of foundational skills, exacerbates proximate causes of school dropouts, such as early marriage (for girls) and entering the workforce (for boys).[16] Additionally, low learning, whether it is due to dropping out or a prolonged pause in education in early years, has been shown to result in lower future lifetime income among children.[17]

1. Global education goals have always been universal.
   • This includes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948; the World Declaration on Education for All in 1990 (also referred to as the Jomtien Declaration); the Millennium Development Goals that specified universal access to primary schooling as a target; and the Sustainable Development Goal for education (SDG 4) that aims for every child in the world to gain at least minimum proficiency in basic skills by 2030.
2. Most children lack foundational skills.
   • Despite these universal declarations, most children lack foundational skills in many countries, even after spending many years in school. In fact, the World Bank's learning poverty measure shows that 80% of 10-year-olds in low-income countries are not able to read and understand a simple text.[10]
3. Increasing access to schooling alone will not ensure learning.
   • Achieving the goal of learning for all will require understanding not only the learning levels and trajectories of children who are enrolled, but of all children. The latter requires models that can simulate counterfactual scenarios of learning among those not currently enrolled to get to the full picture of cohort learning. What limited data is available on such counterfactuals suggests that more schooling alone would leave many without basic skills, and would have little to no effect on the percentage of children reaching the minimum proficiency levels stipulated in the SDGs.[18]
4. Most learning measures focus on students, not cohorts.
   • Many learning assessments focus only on children who are in school, rather than measure the learning of an entire cohort of children both in and out of school. As a result, these learning assessments depict progress on student learning for children that are enrolled, but they do not indicate progress on cohort-wide learning. This means that current measures are likely overestimating the state of learning among children.

Evidence from learning profiles shows that learning gaps emerge early—and when children fall behind early, they rarely catch up. For example, an evaluation of textbook provision in rural Kenya concluded that only top-performing students saw test score gains from the availability of additional textbooks, while the intervention had no impact on lower performing students.[19] This is because an overambitious curriculum had left children so far behind they had not mastered English-language literacy, so they did not benefit from English textbooks. Similarly, an evaluation of the effect of primary school scholarships in rural Cambodia found that poverty targeted scholarships increased enrolment and attainment but had no effect on learning. Children were already so far behind that increased enrolment had no impact on the learning achieved.[20]

Children must gain conceptual knowledge (i.e., understanding the principles within a particular domain such as literacy or numeracy), as well as procedural knowledge (i.e., being able to fluently complete tasks in the domain), neither of which can be achieved through rote learning. Conceptual knowledge is an understanding of the principles and interrelationships within a particular domain, whereas procedural knowledge is an ability to use sequences of actions to complete tasks in a domain.

For student learning to be meaningful and practicable, it needs to develop to a certain level of mastery. Without such mastery, any new learning attained will not be sufficiently consolidated for a child (or adult) to use effectively and flexibly, whether as a basis for more advanced learning or for responding to one's environment in daily life. A foundation of prior knowledge in long-term memory enables children to use their working memory to build new knowledge on top of this foundation. In an education system, if a teacher asks a student to complete a learning task for which they lack sufficient prior knowledge, then either:

• They will fail to complete the task;
• They will complete the task superficially, but will remember the new content inaccurately because they lack the prior knowledge needed to construct accurate mental representations of the new content;[21] or
• They will complete the task superficially, but will not remember any of the new content because their working memory was fully occupied with strategies for completing the task, leaving no room for thinking about the meaning of the new content.[22]