Pakistan Data and Research for Education (DARE)
The Data and Research for Education (DARE) program addresses key constraints in Pakistan's education system to enable quality education for all children, particularly for girls and those marginalized by location, ethnicity, religion and disability. Through DARE, AIR has two contracts from the World Bank–funded by the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office–to provide technical assistance on large-scale student assessments at the national and provincial levels in Pakistan.
AIR executed the policy linking method for Punjab’s Large-Scale Assessment in Grade 5 English, Math, and Urdu as well as Pakistan’s National Achievement Test (NAT) in Grade 4 English and Grade 8 Math, Sindhi, and Urdu. Policy linking is a methodology developed for the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and U.S. Agency for International Developing in 2019 and 2020. Policy linking allows countries to use their existing student assessments, link the assessments to the Global Proficiency Framework, and set benchmarks for proficiency in reading and math. Countries can use the benchmarks to measure proficiency for in-country purposes and reporting progress for Sustainable Development Goal Indicator 4.1.1.
For the National Education Assessment System (NEAS), AIR is partnering with the Pakistan Institute of Education (PIE)–of which NEAS became a part in 2022–to assess the technical needs of the previous NAT in 2019 and provide guidance on how to structure the next iteration of the NAT in 2023. In addition, AIR will provide statistical and psychometric analysis along with technical report writing and data visualization to allow PIE to conclude its reporting and dissemination of results for the 2019 NAT.
