Connecting Children’s Edtech Research Ecosystem And Core Competencies For Standards-Based Education In Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Despite advanced digital innovations revolutionising many sectors of nations’ economies, the 2019 pandemic forced the closure of schools with few antidotes to meeting children’s developmental needs. As the global community is taking stock of school disruptions occasioned by natural disasters, wars, and pandemics today, discourse on quality learning outcomes for children has gained the attention of global partners in education. While the disruptions showed the unpreparedness of education systems to adopt digital resources against exogenous factors globally, they also highlighted the non-resilience of early grade systems to deploy creative pedagogies for children’s global competencies in many countries in the global majority. Teachers and children’s digital resilience are imperative for sustainable educational outcomes in early-grade classrooms. Still, many digital interventions introduced to support continuous education focused on adults with minimal attention to children’s developmental psychology needs, accessible education, a widening digital divide, and global skills. Evidence-based and brain science-inspired digital learning grounded interventions involving edtech solutions are needed to support inquiry based pedagogy in schools. Hence, the research explored how children’s digital ecosystem impacts children’s 21st-century skills in post-pandemic classrooms in Sub-Saharan Africa using a mixed-methods research design, including participatory coding to generate observation data from 102 children’s classrooms and teacher surveys across five regions in Ghana. Checklist items were coded and visualised alongside descriptive statistics, while Kruskal-Wallis, logistic regression, t-test, and ANOVA were used to test six hypotheses for evidence-based decision making. The results showed a post-pandemic digital ecosystem characterised by laboratory settings for children learning ‘about’ computers instead of learning ‘with’ computers, as access favoured private than public schools. Similarly, access had no significant impact on children’s inquiry-based learning, global skills, and inclusive didactics, which is partly attributed to low teacher digital adoption skills for online instruction. The study concluded that despite the adoption of standards-based learning reforms for some Sub-Saharan African education systems requiring a digital integration framework, digital disparities exist in learning environments as investment in computers is yet to influence careers and core competencies, and facilitators are slowly applying technology and pedagogical content knowledge to problem-based learning and online education simulations. Hence, should there be a reemergence of a pandemic, the weak children’s edtech ecosystems will compel education systems’ shutdown, and educators are yet to translate access to online and multimedia content to elicit Sub-Saharan Africa learners’ 21st-century skills. Implications of the primary results are discussed for edtech policy, and teacher professional development recommendations are made.