Practical Education Network
Executive Summary
Project Host:
Project Host: Practical Education Network
Fellows:
Lindsay Kincaid, Team Lead, Social Entrepreneur Fellow
Oluwakemi Olurinola, Research Fellow
Animesh Priya, Social Entrepreneur Fellow
Teomara (Teya) Rutherford, Research Fellow
Introduction
In Ghana, students often describe their education as "Chew and pour, pass and forget," reflecting a system heavily reliant on rote memorization, particularly in STEM subjects. To address this, the Government of Ghana has set an ambitious goal of having 60% of students pursue STEM fields at the university level. However, this shift requires a transformation in how STEM education is delivered.
The Practical Education Network (PEN) is at the forefront of this change, empowering educators to create hands-on, inquiry-based learning environments using locally available, low-cost materials. PEN’s innovative approach bridges the gap between theory and practice, enabling students to engage with STEM subjects in a tangible, interactive way. To date, PEN has trained around 150 trainers and 9,000 teachers, reaching 2 million learners who have benefited from meaningful, hands-on STEM education for the first time.
The LEAP project aimed to support PEN in three critical areas: designing a tracer study to evaluate long-term program impact, providing recommendations for organizational growth, and developing strategies to contextualize and communicate program effects effectively.
Organisation’s Role & Strength
PEN’s mission is to enable every African child to learn by doing. They are transforming STEM education in Ghana and beyond by equipping educators with the tools and training they need to implement practical, experiential learning. The organization’s innovative teacher training program reduces barriers to hands-on learning in material resource-constrained settings, fostering critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills among students.
PEN’s impact extends beyond classrooms: its methods have been integrated into Ghana’s national science curriculum and it has helped bring “hands-on” and “STEM” into everyday parlance amongst education stakeholders in Ghana. While the organization extends its reach geographically, it is also interested in understanding the depth of its impact on students. Specifically it seeks to uncover the extent to which students taught by teachers trained in hands-on approaches may be more likely to pursue STEM majors, which can directly inform policies to achieve the government’s goals. PEN’s emphasis on sustainability through the reliance on locally-available materials and on scalability through the training-of-trainers model positions its approach to be replicated across diverse educational contexts.
Need Summary
To achieve its mission, PEN seeks to deepen its impact through robust research, improved program fidelity, and effective communication of results. Key priorities include:
Evidence Generation: Developing a tracer study to track the long-term impact of its teacher training programs on student outcomes and career choices.
Program Fidelity: Strengthening implementation practices to ensure consistent quality across training sessions and classrooms.
Growth & Communication: Expanding digital resource libraries, fostering community forums for teachers, and refining strategies to communicate program outcomes to stakeholders, including government officials and funders.
The LEAP project focused on addressing these priorities through tailored recommendations and actionable plans.
Solution Summary & Next Steps
The LEAP Fellows provided PEN with four key deliverables to support its goals:
Tracer Study Plan: Fellows designed a comprehensive tracer study to evaluate the long-term outcomes of PEN’s programs on teachers and students. This included developing sampling procedures, measurement tools, and analysis strategies to assess teacher adoption of hands-on methods and student progression into STEM fields (Deliverable 1).
Organizational Growth Recommendations: Fellows proposed strategies to improve program fidelity, such as incorporating a conceptual framework for measuring implementation consistency. Additional recommendations included expanding PEN’s digital resource library and fostering online community forums to facilitate peer learning among educators (Deliverable 2).
Future Research Options: Fellows outlined research opportunities to further PEN’s understanding of the impact of their program. This included a detailed typology of studies to assess the impact of PEN’s programs and strategies for aligning these studies with organizational priorities (Deliverable 3).
Contextualizing & Communicating Effects: Fellows provided a framework for effectively communicating PEN’s impact to diverse audiences, including government stakeholders. This included recommendations on using standard deviations to present effect sizes and models for clear, impactful storytelling (Deliverable 4).
These deliverables collectively will equip PEN to enhance its program delivery, generate evidence of its impact, and scale its approach to transform STEM education across Ghana and beyond. The methodology developed through this project can also serve as a model for other organizations seeking to implement and evaluate hands-on STEM education programs in settings with minimal material resources.