As temperature rises, there are predictions from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that radical climate change will cause sea levels to rise, increase the number of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and storms, and increase the spread of tropical diseases.
That extra heat, Inger Andersen, the executive director of UNEP, told delegates attending the sixth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly that took place in Nairobi recently, will also reduce snow cover and sea ice, intensify heavy rainfall and change habitat ranges for plants and animals but, more seriously, impact on global economic activities and the health of vast numbers of people.
But what is in doubt is to what extent the rising temperatures will have an impact on learning outcomes in most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the performance of the high-stakes examinations used for the selection of students for university entry that are done in institutions without air-conditioning.
To look into the issue, two economists at the World Bank’s Development Research Group, Dr Patrick Behrer and Dr Kibrom Tafere, and their associate, Bhavya Srivastava, who is currently a PhD candidate at Georgetown University in the United States and a consultant at the World Bank, undertook a study in Ethiopia to find out whether high temperatures reduce test scores in a high-stakes examination.
The study, ‘High Temperature and Learning Outcomes: Evidence from Ethiopia’, which was published by the World Bank earlier in March and is based on datasets of 2.47 million students who took the national high-stakes university entrance examination, the Ethiopian Higher Education Entrance Certificate Examination (EHEECE) between 2003 and 2019.
According to the researchers, EHEECE is a critical examination that determines access to higher education in Ethiopia and can have important long-term implications for individuals’ educational attainment and future labour market outcomes.
In that context, it determines whether or not students can enrol in the undergraduate programmes of their choice, or even the particular university which they would like to join.
“Students who fail the examination usually take up vocational jobs, informal jobs, or work in agriculture, while those who pass have the opportunity to take up jobs which generally offer higher wages and benefits,” stated the study.
High temperature connected to poor performance
In their data analysis, the researchers found that exposure to high temperatures during the examination year is associated with poorer performance in examinations, which was driven by hot days during the school year as compared to hot days during summer breaks.
They also found that academic performance in EHEECE among females was less impacted by high temperatures, a factor that researchers attributed to more effort women put in, relative to men, which may have compensated for the negative impact of heat exposure.
Behrer and his associates assumed that EHEECE may be higher stakes for women as a consequence of not going to college, which made women work harder than men during heat exposure, noted the study.
Besides, the researchers noted that female students in Ethiopia have a lower likelihood of extended absence from school compared to their male counterparts. “That aspect provides suggestive evidence that female students exert more effort to attend school as compared to men,” stated the researchers.
In this context, the researchers said there is evidence that female students put in more time on homework compared to male students, as many of them are aware of the social norms and cultural stresses they would encounter in the future without success in higher education.
There were also indicators that students from schools located in hotter regions are better able to cope with higher temperatures compared to their peers, who are located in relatively cooler regions.
According to the researchers, the negative relationship between heat and learning outcomes found in the study is primarily driven by students in cooler regions.
Adaptation
Although it was not clear to researchers as to whether the disparity in the impact of high temperatures could be attributed to either physiological adaptation or acclimatisation by students in hotter regions, the negligible availability of cooling technologies in Ethiopian schools made the researchers believe the evidence of adaptation to heat conditions.
The issue is that, although Ethiopia has increased institutions offering EHEECE since 2000, as a way of increasing access to university education, only 8% of such schools have any adoption of heat adaptation technologies, such as fans, evaporative air cooling facilities, or air-conditioning systems.
In that case, there are possibilities that students from schools located in hotter areas might be better at adapting to higher temperatures as compared to the students who live in relatively colder areas.
The issue is that, since the mid-20th century, the mean annual temperature in Ethiopia has been increasing steadily, and currently, climate model projections indicate warming across all Ethiopian seasons, with the mean annual temperature rising by 1°C-2°C since 1950. By 2060, the researchers said the number of days with high temperatures is expected to increase between 15% and 29% of the year.
The study stresses that, whereas some zones in Ethiopia experience moderate temperatures ranging between 16°C and 30°C, temperatures in the tropical and arid zones range from 27°C to 50°C.
To understand how the emerging environmental temperature rise could impact the cognitive performance and possibly influence the future career development of individual students, the researchers examined how the 2.13 million students performed in various subjects offered in the EHEECE, the college entrance examination.
Although the regional database contained 2.47 million students, the researchers, at this stage did not consider students who were retaking the tests or those who were over 21 years of age.
Subsequently, the results of the study showed that high temperatures impacted test scores for all the core subjects in both natural sciences and social sciences that were in the EHEECE subject menu. In this regard, a significant impact was recorded in physics, chemistry, biology and general science, as well as in economics, history and geography, which are all key areas of study in universities.
Significant negative impacts were also recorded in the challenging subjects of English and mathematics. However, higher negative impacts were recorded among all students in their performances in the much easier aptitude test and civics. According to the researchers, that was consistent with the theory of female students offsetting the negative impact of heat with greater effort.
“We believe that this is because, conditional on temperature, students exert higher levels of effort on more difficult subjects as compared to the easier ones,” said Behrer and his co-authors of the study.
Interventions
According to the World Bank, this is the first study in Sub-Saharan Africa to investigate the impact of high environmental temperatures on cognitive development and in the performance of high-stakes examinations for university entry and career selection.
In this case, the study showed that with each additional day with temperatures above 33°C, the total standardised test scores of students are reduced.
Taking into account that students from schools located in hotter regions in Ethiopia are better able to cope with higher temperatures as compared to their counterparts from cooler regions, there is a need for countries in the region to start thinking about the quality of educational institutions, in terms of construction infrastructure and adaptation of heat control technologies.
As researchers suggested, further studies are required to investigate why high temperatures have a smaller adverse impact on women’s scores in comparison with their male counterparts. Could potential explanations for this include physiological differences in resilience to heat between females and males, changes in societal norms that benefit females, or because women have a low rate of absenteeism from school?
The study proposes that many possibilities need to be investigated, not just in Ethiopia, but in other African countries. For instance, why do women in Ethiopia appear to be putting more effort into those high-stakes examinations than their male peers? Is that scenario unique to Ethiopian higher education?
Further, to what extent could adaptation and investments in fans and air-conditioning in schools help students cope better with higher temperatures, and possibly indirectly also reduce absenteeism?
But, no matter which direction the research on the impact of a rise in temperatures on higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa will take, the brain’s circuit networks appear to be temperature-sensitive and, therefore, African countries need to be ready to deal with the issue.
University World News
