Student Profiles

Ben Piper , EPLIP

Analyzing paper work, statistics, and forming data sets may not sound like a glamorous summer job, but for doctoral student Benjamin Piper it was the cause that drove his interest.

Piper spent a portion of the summer in Malawi examining data on children's enrollment in primary and secondary school for Save the Children USA, an organization dedicated to advocating change for children around the world. Despite being one of the first Sub-Saharan African countries to move to free access to primary school in 1994, less than 30 percent of Malawian students enter secondary school, Piper says.

"This dataset is interesting because it allows us to look at the schooling trajectories that Malawian primary school students follow, and investigate what the barriers to secondary school access are," Piper says. "This is particularly important given that while primary school access is slowly becoming more equitably distributed, larger gaps between groups are occurring at the secondary school level in Sub-Saharan Africa."

Piper spent the early part of the summer working on data sets, gathering more information, and exploring different variables. At the end of August, he traveled to Malawi in order to collect more data in the country, as well as interview students and school staff. Piper describes the experience as "invigorating."

In particular Piper saw that his training and data exploration efforts helped local government employees think about how best to arrange teacher training to increase student achievement in Chichewa, the local language. Piper demonstrated that the previous training efforts had increased English achievement at the expense of Chichewa achievement. Seeing these policymakers take practical steps to determine how best to eliminate that problem was rewarding, he said.

Not only did he find the time to speak to students, school officials, and community members, but he also held training sessions for Save the Children technical staff.

In these sessions, Piper took the statistical skills and pedagogical techniques that he learned from Eliot Professor John Willett and created tailored multiple regression data analysis sessions using locally relevant datasets.

Throughout his years at HGSE, Piper has focused his research work on sub-Sahara Africa. Upon earning his doctoral degree, he hopes to work in education development in Africa.

"My interest in education development is to take the advantages I've had and try to contribute to the development that's already going on in Sub-Saharan Africa," Piper said. "Ideally, I'll use my training from here for the good of others there."