Community Building Through Inclusive Education

Turkey hosts around 4 million refugees, of which 3.6 million refugees are from Syria, which is more than half of the Syrian refugee population in the Middle East region. While ensuring that every refugee child has access to quality education is of the highest importance, “the refugee crisis” urges us to rethink the way that the Turkish education system can best serve its multiethnic, multilingual body in a more inclusive way. 

In recently published report entitled “ Community Building Through Inclusive Education ”, Education Reform Initiative (ERG) constructs and promotes  a holistic paradigm for inclusive education in Turkey. In addition to recapitulating the scope and complexity of the challenge that refugees and their host communities throughout Turkey face in education, this report delineates the concrete steps that must be taken in order to ensure that refugee children become long-term members of Turkish society. It also promotes a holistic paradigm for inclusive education for the relatively more flexible civil society actors, such as family and corporate foundations, which can supplement inclusive education policies implemented at the macro-level. 

Gender Gaps in Student Achievement in Turkey: PISA 2015 Findings

This work revisits academic achievement gender gaps in reading, mathematics and science in Turkey, using the most recent wave of data collected by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2015. It starts by estimating education production functions in reading, mathematics and science for boys and girls separately, and follows by decomposing the predicted gender gaps into components due to student, family and school characteristics, and due to the returns on the characteristics.

Gender Gaps in Student Achievement in Turkey: TIMSS 2015 Findings

This paper revisits gender gaps in mathematics and science performance in Turkey based on the data collected by Trends in International and Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 2015. TIMSS provides a rich dataset that is well suited to study student performance and gender gaps in mathematics and science in the fourth and eighth grade, and to revisit gender gaps in mathematics and science in Turkey, a country characterised by relatively low gender equality.

Enrollment in Early Childhood Education and Care in Turkey

Education Reform Initiative (ERG), in collaboration with Mother Child Education Foundation (AÇEV) has prepared a study on “Enrollment in Early Childhood Education and Care in Turkey”.In this note, we aimed to show that enrollment in early childhood education and care in Turkey varies by age and type of household. Based on the research findings* that deeply analyzes the parameters of this variation on age basis, we developed policy recommendations regarding different age and target groups.
*2013 Turkey Population and Health Research (TPHR)

Research findings point that there is still low participation in preprimary education in Turkey. On the other hand, it increases when the child’s age and the wealth of the household increases. The most important variables that affect the participation in preprimary education are wealth of the household, level of mother’s education and mother’s employment.

Inclusive Education Study

Education Reform Initiative (ERG), in collaboration with UNICEF Turkey has prepared a study on inclusive education in Turkey. Within the scope of this study, access and quality aspects of inclusive education have been evaluated by investigating regulations, policies, practices and experiences. 4 publications have been prepared as a result of this project.

ERG-UNICEF-MEB Joint Research Project Publications

ERG, initiated three separate research projects in January 2011 with the collaboration of UNICEF and the MoNE General Directorate of Primary Education. In the first research project, the effect of economic crisis on the student attendance to school was examined in the light of e-school data and policies developed for a more effective use of the e-school system. The second research focused on which features of students were the determinants of access to secondary education, the report aimed to bring recommendations toward increasing access to secondary school. In the third research, results of a field research on the ways in which primary schools create and use resources formed the basis of model building activities in order to make resource use more equalitarian and efficient.