Recruitment and Training of Assessors

27 control of the data collection could be optimized as the date, time, and GPS of the school location could be monitored from the device. The step-by-step activities that were carried out by each assessor team in each school are as follows: a. The assessors introduced themselves and sought permission from the head teacher upon their arrival. The team leader explained the purpose of the assessment. A room for assessment was requested, such as in the library, an extra curricula room, empty classroom, etc. b. The assessor team selected the second grade classroom with the mechanism that was explained in the previous sub-section. If required, third grade students were also involved. A simple random sampling was applied. c. The assessor team chose 20 students from the selected classrooms. The names of the students were listed on two separate lists: boys and girls based on their seating arrangement. The assessor team requested random numbers from their electronic device in order to select the students. d. Selected students were then taken to the assessment room one by one until all 20 students completed the interviews. e. Two teachers from the selected classroom observing gender balance were randomly chosen using a simple random sample method. Teacher interviews were conducted after the students were interviewed. f. Lastly, the head teacher was interviewed. g. Parallel with the school assessment, two assessors from the team started interviews with the parents or the caregivers. Home interviews were conducted. The addresses of the selected students were requested from the head teacher. h. Each assessor team assessed one school for 3 days. Therefore, the total number of survey days was around 30 days. For the in-depth interviews, the following are the step-by-step activities: a. The key informants were identified and then approached to be interviewed. Children and their parents were selected from the sample of the quantitative survey. The same 28 procedure was applied to the teachers. Meanwhile, the head teachers were selected from the same schools of the selected children and teachers. b. The community leaders were identified prior to the data collection. Advice from UNICEF was sought to determine the key informants. c. Similarly, the key informants from MOEC at the provincial and district levels were also identified and advice from UNICEF was also requested.

2.9 Final Sample

The numbers attained for the final sample in the data collection are presented in Table 2.6. The total number of schools that were assessed is 180, equally distributed across districts. The number of head teachers planned to be interviewed was 180. However, the head teachers in one school in Mimika and one in Jayawijaya could not be interviewed as they were unavailable at school during the three days of assessment. None of the senior teachers or assistant head teachers was also available to be interviewed then. Similarly, the number of teachers that had been interviewed was also under the target. The total sample of teachers to be interviewed was 360, consisting of two teachers per school as the sample. However, in some schools, there was only one teacher who taught early grade classes. The number of students in the sample was also under the target. Each district was planned to have a sample size of 600 students. However, the real condition in the field revealed that not all schools had 20 students from second and third grades. In addition, during the three days of assessment, not all students of the early grades came to school. In regards to the parents, not all parents provided a positive response to be interviewed. Some of them did not want to participate in this study. In terms of the number of school observations, all schools were observed by the assessors, and this resulted in 100 achievement. However, the classroom observations were under target as in some cases there was only one classroom for both second and third grades.