INSTRUCTIONAL TELEVISION IN EL SALVADOR [1970]

In El Salvador, one innovation, an educational reform including instructional television, has had a significant incremental impact on learning.

Instructional television played a significant role in El Salvador's efforts to reform grades 7, 8 and 9 of its educational system.

In 1969, with the help from the US Agency for International Development and other outside organizations, the El Salvador Ministry of Education launched a major education reform. It included, for the seventh, eight and ninth grades, curriculum reform, new student and teacher printed materials, bureaucratic reorganization, teacher retraining and television.


The goals of the reform were:

To increase enrollments,
Eliminate tuition in public schools,
Lower failure rates,
Retrain teachers,
Improve the curriculum,
And train students for service and technical careers.

Changes in the system at least partially attributable to the use of instructional television (ITV) included a tripling of public school enrollments, increased student achievement, the development of positive attitudes toward education and technology, the improvement of teaching, and the general raising of educational aspirations.

Other developing nations seeking educational reform can profit by following El Salvador's example regarding strong leadership and the use of a system approach, but should be cognizant of several attendant problems.

These include:

1) The difficulty of providing personnel and facilities to produce ITV programming;
2) The need to uncover better ways of implementing change in traditional societies;
3) Rising absolute costs, even when the system is cost-effective and
4) The tendency of students to maintain unrealistic educational aspirations and to adhere to an outmoded but prestigious academic curriculum.


Each classroom received three to five 20 minute weekly broadcasts in each of the five basic subjects. Student workbooks provided complementary text and exercises. Each teacher, many of whom were upgraded for primary school jobs, had been retrained for up to nine months in a subject specially, pedagogical technique and utilization of television.

Simultaneously, the newly reformed Third Cycle [as grades seven to nine are called in El Salvador] opened its doors to many more students. Free tuition, double sessions and a higher student/teacher ratio permitted a tripling of enrollment in the public schools.