IIP Placements in Paraguay
Innovations for Poverty Action
Location: Asunción, Paraguay
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a non-profit organization that creates and evaluates solutions to social and development problems and works to scale up successful ideas through implementation and dissemination to policymakers, practitioners, investors, and donors. In Paraguay, interns will work on a project called Big Math Paraguay: In the education systems of the region there is much less interest for the development of mathematical competencies and abilities in preschool education than for the competencies in reading and writing. Emerging research on early childhood quantitative understanding indicates positive outcomes resulting from teaching math in early years. As a result, interest in early childhood education is on the rise. In the hope of facilitating the transition from preschool math (for example, counting) to primary-level math (for example, arithmetic), and reducing the number of students that need later intervention, the governments of many countries like Paraguay have shown an interest in introducing early childhood math in preschool education. In Paraguay the Ministry of Education and Culture of Paraguay and the Inter-American Development Bank are collaborating on the implementation of a pilot that seeks to adapt, develop, evaluate, and disseminate a curriculum for the teaching of mathematics in preschool, with emphasis on the development of learning strategies differentiated for each phase of childhood development. Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI) will be used to deliver the curriculum to the students. Interns will:
- Participate in an on-going field experiment: Interns assist with overall project monitoring and implementation: coordinating between field survey teams, strategic partners, vendors, data entry teams, and other support staff; facilitating the data entry process; and contributing to data cleaning and analysis.
- Conduct exploratory qualitative work: Interns may conduct open-ended interviews with school staff and communities to document puzzling facts or behaviors and help develop new research ideas and designs.
Candidates should have course work or experience in research methods; coursework in econometrics, advanced knowledge of Stata or experience with data management; and Ffamiliarity with randomized control trials. Spanish fluency is required. Two placements have been created for International Internship Program (IIP) interns.