Instructional alignment in Nigeria using the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum

This study examines quantitative evidence on education system coherence in Nigeria. Available pieces of evidence indicate that alignment of instructional components, such as curriculum standards, assessments, and teachers’ instruction, is important for primary-level education. This study employed the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) methodology to investigate alignment of instructional components in Nigeria's primary education system, covering two states, ‘Oyo and Jigawa’. The two states were carefully chosen to account for both geographical differences and student achievement levels in Nigeria. Oyo represents a high performing area in the south in terms of student achievements while Jigawa represents a low performing area in the North. We adopted the SEC common language to analyse curriculum standards, national exams, and classroom instructional content for mathematics and English language across all six primary-level grades (1−6) for the two states. We found that key foundational mathematics and English language skills are covered by all three components, with notable omission of some critical topic areas on the end-of-cycle English language exams. All three components give high emphasis to the low cognitive demand processes of ‘memorize’ ‘perform’, and ‘demonstrate’, and give low emphasis to the more demanding cognitive processes of ‘analyse’ and ‘apply ’. Both the curriculum standards and classroom instruction depict a slow pace of content progression across grades, manifested through broad but shallow content coverage. We observed high alignment between the curriculum standards and classroom instruction, implying a potentially well-functioning education system. However, we found low student performance on the exams for both subjects, thereby contradicting this hypothesis. These findings suggest the Nigerian primary education system may be operating in a low-achieving equilibrium in which the system is aligned for low levels of cognitive demand and student mastery.