By Manal Nadeem
Abstract
The UAE consistently underperforms on global academic benchmark tests. This is particularly intensified in the transition from secondary to tertiary education where a lack of preparedness for the demands of a tertiary education becomes apparent. However, research on educational inequality in the UAE lacks on several fronts. Existing research on educational inequality in the UAE has tended to focus predominantly on educational inequalities between public and private schools or nationals and expats. This dichotomous approach mimics public/private binaries in Western pedagogical discourses and obscures the unique context of the UAE–namely, the demographic diversity of the UAE and how this maps onto the various curricula taught across primary and secondary schools in the UAE. This paper aims to deconstruct the dichotomies that characterize research on educational inequalities in the UAE by presenting survey research conducted at the American University of Sharjah. Specifically, this survey provides preliminary evidence that confirms systematic disparities in educational outcomes across curricula. The paper then outlines areas for future research and provides recommendations on how to apply this research to the context of local education institutions.
Keywords: academic writing, educational inequality, writing proficiency, curriculum
Introduction
The first time I became conscious of systematic disparities in writing instruction in the UAE was when I arrived at university. In my introductory Academic Writing classes (WRI 101 and WRI 102), I struggled with conducting independent research using scholarly sources and familiarizing myself with academic citation systems such as APA, neither of which I had encountered during my secondary education. Meanwhile, some of my peers from various curricula, such as the International Baccalaureate (IB) and American curricula, had experienced both. At the same time, having come from a British curriculum school, I was the beneficiary of deeply entrenched cultural capital—native English-speaking teachers and rigorous essay writing assignments—that gave me relative confidence in the English language. This dual awareness, both of the advantages and disadvantages I had incurred through my secondary education, catalyzed my curiosity in how global pedagogical discourses on educational inequality translated to the context of the UAE. Particularly, I became fascinated with how the demographic diversity of the UAE—widely recognized as a diverse country with one of the highest expat-to-local ratios of anywhere in the world (Vora, 2015)—mapped onto the primary and secondary education landscape. In turn, I became curious about the implications of this fragmented secondary education landscape for a university like the American University of Sharjah (AUS) where mostly monolingual, English-only writing instruction must respond to the diverse and heterogeneous educational histories of its students, depending on their past encounters and experiences with writing instruction and their relative confidence in academic writing in English. As a result, this paper presents survey research conducted at AUS in order to better understand the relationship between school curriculum and academic writing preparedness in the UAE. Specifically, my working thesis is that school curricula that equip their students with higher-order composition and critical thinking skills, as well as train them in argumentative tasks, best prepare their students for success in academic writing while curricula that equip students with comprehension and literacy skills as well as train them in narrative/exposition tasks produce less prepared students.
Global ‘Achievement Gap’
Educational inequality has been the subject of much research worldwide. Landmark studies in the sociology of education, such as Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor which explores disillusionment amongst working-class male students in London, focus on the effects of social identities such as class, gender, and ethnicity on educational achievement. These differential educational outcomes are variously called the “achievement gap” and the “education debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p. 24). While some research focuses primarily on structural inequalities such as socioeconomic status, others look at the everyday mechanisms–such as cultural capital–which produce these inequalities (Rubin, 2014).
The study of writing skills, meanwhile, is complicated by the lack of consensus on what constitutes writing proficiency. Different writers have deployed different metrics to operationalize this elusive construct. For example, Deane et al. (2008) deconstructs “writing skills” into three skill levels: language and literacy skills (automatic); document-creation and document-management-skills (strategic); and critical-thinking skills (cognitive). Others, like Matsumo (2019), adopt a more process-oriented approach to writing proficiency, disaggregating the writing process into ‘before writing’ and ‘after writing.’ Over the last five decades, a sophisticated standardized testing regime–encompassing tests such as PISA, IELTS, and TOEFL–has emerged globally. However, the use of these tests as a measure of writing proficiency only reflects one-off grades and bypasses important questions around the mechanisms at the primary and secondary school level that produce systematically different writing outcomes.
‘Achievement Gap’ in the UAE
There is a dearth of equivalent research on educational disparities, and specifically disparities in writing outcomes, in the UAE. Where such research has been conducted in the UAE, the operating distinction is often between public and private schools. This distinction reflects categories used in Western pedagogical literature where the public/private school binary is highly charged and contentious. For example, in the UK, private/public schools reflect deeply corrosive class fault lines and signify socioeconomic inequalities (Edwards, 2020).
More contextualized studies tailored to the UAE use the categories of “national” and “expatriate” as in the “national-expatriate education gap” (Marquez, 2022) to demonstrate that, contrary to global trends, expats significantly outperform local students in the UAE. However, these dichotomies are still not analytically useful for the UAE where there is arguably more diversity within these categories–whether “public/private” or “national/expatriate”–than between them; talking exclusively in dichotomous terms obscures the vast internal diversity contained within these broad categories. For example, while public schools (mostly) cater to the minority of local Emirati students, the private sector abounds with schools of various curriculums–British (GCSE’s), Indian (CBSE), American, French, Filipino, and Pakistani, amongst others–that cater to a diverse clientele segmented along nationality and socioeconomic status (Matsumoto, 2019). Oversimplified binary categories fail to capture this curricular diversity.
Educational History in the UAE
Prior to independence, the UAE had no Ministry of Education under the British (Gobert, 2019). Lacking a curriculum of its own, the country initially imported the national curriculum of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Education. It was at the turn of the century that the UAE’s still-fledgling educational landscape began to crystallize and consolidate into its current form. In 2008, the ‘New School Model,’ now called the ‘Emirati School Model,’ was adopted in Abu Dhabi and used across all Ministry of Education schools throughout the UAE (Gobert, 2019, p. 118). These schools mandated the use of English instruction for mathematics and science and introduced native English-speaking teachers to replace the previously mostly Arab teachers.
In parallel to the public school system, the private sector also began to boom in the UAE in the early 2000’s. The growth of the private sector reflects the neoliberal economic model of the country, where noncitizen expats must access public goods–such as education and healthcare–through private, market-based, and often expensive provision (Vora, 2008). Perhaps nowhere is this private education industry boom better embodied than in the remarkable expansion of the education conglomerate, Global Education Management System (GEMS), which operates more than fifty private schools across the country with five different curricula (Gobert, 2019, p. 119).
Below Benchmark Performance in the UAE
The UAE has consistently underperformed on global benchmark tests. In 2006, the UAE had a failure rate of 47% on the Preliminary English Test (PET) (Gobert, 2019, p. 120). More recently, the UAE ranked below the world average in international benchmarks like the PISA test (Program for International Student Assessment) which assesses competence amongst fifteen-year old students worldwide in reading, mathematics, and science (Marquez et al., 2022).
This lack of academic preparedness becomes glaringly evident in the transition between secondary and tertiary education. For example, a UAE Ministry of Education study found that public school students were not adequately prepared for tertiary education in English, hence necessitating high-cost remedial foundation programs at universities aimed at public school students which amounted to 300 million AED in 2014 (Gobert, 2019). Indeed, this “quality gap” is observed not just in the UAE but across the Gulf region as well, including in neighboring countries such as Qatar where foundation programs receive exorbitant amounts of funding annually (Elhassan, 2019). Meanwhile, private schools in the UAE so vastly outperform public schools that there has been a growth in a hybrid category: government-funded private school providers, such as ALDAR Academies and Emirates National Schools, which are run by the federal government but offer international curriculums such as the British curriculum and International Baccalaureate respectively in order to cater to increased demand for private education (Gobert, 2019, p. 122).
Despite the various gaps in the literature, there are some promising studies on academic writing that begin to broach the questions this paper is interested in. One study finds that a lack of assignments geared towards critical thinking skills amongst curricula in the Gulf region can be attributed to the Western-style curricula that are not adapted to local contexts (Sperrazza and Raddawi, 2016). Through interventions that invite a set of university students to answer essay prompts on their local cultural contexts rather than Western ones, the study finds that students wrote more critically on the former than the latter. It is this nexus between different curricula and academic writing preparedness that the research below aims to better explore.
Primary Research
Research Questions and Objectives
This paper asks the following research questions: ‘How do different school curricula in the UAE prepare students for academic writing at the university level?’ Related sub-questions also include the following: ‘What writing skills were students trained in at school?’, ‘What type of writing tasks were students exposed to at school?’, and ‘How much exposure did students have to English outside of the classroom (at home, with friends, in leisure time)?’
Results
A preliminary analysis reveals vast disparities between students from different curricula. When asked how far they believed that their secondary education adequately prepared them for academic writing at the university level, 80% of students from American curriculum schools said ‘very prepared’ or ‘somewhat prepared.’ Conversely, 75% of students from national Ministry of Education schools said ‘hardly prepared’ or ‘not at all prepared.’
However, the objective of this research is not to construct a hierarchy of curricula as doing so risks reproducing normative understandings of who is, and can be, a proficient English writer. Instead of asking who, the goal is to ask how–that is, to interrogate the mechanisms that produce disparate writing outcomes at the tertiary level. Therefore, subsequent questions were designed to identify the specific pathways and mechanisms through which educational disparities are produced. Namely, survey questions were split into the following sections: questions on languages in order to understand the respondent’s linguistic portfolio both in order of fluency and in order of acquisition (for example, mother tongue, followed by second language); questions on timelines for when respondents acquired specific writing skills; and the most significant subset of questions was devoted to gauging the respondent’s relative confidence in specific writing skills. Deane’s (2008) typology of writing proficiency was employed to inform this research design, consisting of questions on language and literacy (automatic skills), writing-process management (strategic skills), and critical thinking (cognitive skills).
These trends of preparedness were consistent across questions, with students from American and British curriculum schools generally expressing greater preparedness for academic writing. The starkest disparities were apparent in responses to the question, ‘How confident were you in conducting independent research in English using scholarly sources when you first started university?’, to which 78% of American curriculum and 86% of British curriculum students responded ‘extremely confident’ or ‘quite confident’ while 75% of national curriculum students responded with ‘not at all confident’ or ‘slightly confident.’
Questions about timelines also displayed this trend. When asked, ‘When did you first learn how to conduct research using academic and scholarly sources?’American curriculum students were most likely to say they had done so ‘before university’ while 100% national curriculum students responded ‘freshman year of university.’ This confirms my hypothesis that some students arrive at university primed and prepared for academic writing more than others.
On the other hand, assessment types remain arguably the most contentious topic within the field of MENA writing instruction. One study finds that poor imitations of Western-style curriculums that are not adapted to local contexts have perpetuated a lack of critical thinking skills amongst students in the Gulf region (Sperrazza and Raddawi, 2016). Various interventions have been further proposed to address this gap. For example, Sperrazza and Raddawi (2016) compared results from a control group and an experimental group of university students assigned essay prompts to answer based on their local cultural contexts rather than Western ones and found that students performed better on these than conventional assignments. Furthermore, Al Naqbi (2011) found that incorporating mind mapping into writing assessments in public schools enabled greater information retrieval and processing for the primarily English as a second-language-speaking students. However, contrary to expectations, this survey did not confirm these findings. When asked about the frequency of their past experience with various writing assessments, AUS students did not demonstrate significant variations in their responses. Generally, students reported completing more descriptive assessments and fewer argumentative assessments, regardless of curriculum. Possible explanations for this discrepancy between the literature and survey results are explored further below.
Finally, the survey also aimed to account for the role of confounding variables which may be influencing writing outcomes. These included exposure to English, which was further broken down into exposure into verbal communication, online communication, and media consumption. When asked, ‘How often did you speak English outside of school during your primary and secondary education?’, the students from American, British and Indian curriculum schools all responded with ‘daily’ or ‘few times a week’ whereas no students from national curriculum schools said ‘daily’ and 100% said ‘once a month’, ‘once a week’, or ‘never’. This is consistent with the extensive literature on “cultural capital”, first formulated by Bourdieu (2018), which states that increased exposure to various forms of culture in a particular language–such as languages and books–accrues into a kind of non-financial capital which perpetuates privilege between generations.
Discussion
While beneficial for a preliminary assessment of key patterns, this survey would constitute only one step of a multi-stage methodology in a large-scale study of curricular diversity in the UAE. For example, a more comprehensive study may begin, first, with unstructured interviews with students to identify key themes that would inform both the types of questions and multiple-choice options to be asked in subsequent surveys. Instead of imposing predetermined themes, the insights that would emerge organically from these interviews would help account for, and preempt, themes that otherwise cannot be anticipated from the literature alone. For example, it is possible that the discrepancy between the literature and these survey results on the role of assessment types (descriptive, narrative, argumentative and persuasive) in writing confidence can be explained by inconsistencies in respondents’ interpretations of keywords such as ‘academic writing’ or ‘scholarly sources’; some outlier responses reported first encountering academic writing as early as the sixth grade. Future studies could account for this perhaps by including visual and pictorial evidence of a sample scholarly source (for example, to distinguish a mere news article from an academic journal article).
Moreover, these survey results are limited by the small sample size (N= 31). This does not just extend to the aggregate sample size–thirty-one respondents–but also to the distribution of responses.
For example, American, British and Indian curriculum students were overrepresented at nine, seven and eight responses respectively, making it harder to extrapolate these findings from the sample to the overall population of the student body in the UAE. To further diversify the sample, future studies may also wish to distribute the survey across the emirates of the UAE. Literature suggests that educational outcomes differ greatly across emirates–with high-achieving, English-medium private schools largely concentrated in the commercial hubs of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah–and this intra-emirate disparity may act as a confounding variable.
A more rigorous comparison of curricula across the UAE may also wish to include methods other than surveys and interviews. This is because surveys over rely on self-reported confidence as an objective measure, or correlate, of writing competence. Demographic variability–such as the overrepresentation of females (87.1%)–may also further interfere with the validity of the data. Future studies may develop a more holistic rubric for analyzing the content of different curricula prevalent across the UAE. These may include classifying curricula according to criteria such as assessment types (whether they are largely multiple choice or independent writing assignments), assessment frequency and duration, and cultural fit between curriculum and student population (how far foreign curricula are tailored to the host country’s culture).
Conclusion
Curricular diversity remains an unexplored area within academia in the Middle East and, particularly, the UAE. While most research has focused on the dichotomy between public and private education, the sheer diversity of curricula in the UAE warrant attention for their corresponding impacts on educational outcomes. This study provides a preliminary survey of these educational disparities at the American University of Sharjah. Namely, it gestures at inequalities across curricula in the nature of writing assessments, relative confidence in various automatic, strategic, and cognitive writing tasks, the timeline of students’ first introduction to academic writing, and exposure to cultural capital. However, in order to be generalizable, future studies must expand the sample size across emirates, higher education institutions and curricula as well as consider more holistic assessments of curricula that extend beyond self-reported surveys.
Regardless of the above limitations, however, this study entails important implications for a tertiary education institution like the American University of Sharjah which welcomes students from a range of educational backgrounds every year. These implications extend not only to individual educators, but also to important campus programs and services such as the Achievement Academy Bridge Program and Writing Center. Specifically, future iterations of the Writing Center’s pre-appointment form may include question(s) for tutees asking about their relative confidence and prior experience in academic writing as well as their high school curricular background; while these questions may function better as optional–rather than mandatory–they would enable tutors to better anticipate the needs of their tutee based on their educational history rather than entering sessions with uniform expectations. In parallel, tutors can be encouraged to share their high school curricular background in their tutor biographies–published on the AUS Writing Center website–in order to allow tutees to make an informed decision when selecting tutors. Finally, in the spirit of peer tutoring, the Achievement Academy Bridge Program (AABP) may also benefit from an in-house equivalent of the Writing Center. While this does not have to be of nearly the same scale as the Writing Center, it would allow students in the AABP to avail support and assistance from a peer and mentor who perhaps shares an education background and history and may be more conducive to egalitarian relationships between tutor and tutee built on solidarity rather than hierarchy.
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Appendix
Please refer to pages 26 to 34 of the digital issue for all appendices.