Research: Water village and its effect on academic achievement

Last week I had the opportunity to visit and interview four Discovery Year students who were attached to the Kg Bolkiah B community library as part of the Community Outreach Programme with Yayasan SHHB.

I was very impressed with the girls, who renovated the library and made it a livelier, more welcoming place for young residents of the village. They also introduced a tuition scheme for mostly primary school students a few days a week as well as other activities such as puppet-shows, colouring contests and reading workshops.

From L: Hafiza, Iffah, Chea and Siti Munirah at the Kg Bolkiah B library.

While their initiative and drive amazed me, I was also very interested in what one of the girls said in her interview. When I asked her how the programme has affected her, she replied that she was more appreciative of the fact that she lived on land and not in Kg Ayer.

But why? She elaborated that the tuition they provided to the village children gave her the impression that they were less academically inclined than land-based children. She is an aspiring teacher and has taught tuition elsewhere, which is presumably how she made the comparison between Kg Ayer and non-Kg Ayer students.

Her response got me thinking: Is there a difference between the academic performance of Kg Ayer students and land-based ones? I was mid-way through Freakonomics at that time and was very inspired to apply the methods used by Steven D. Levitt to answer questions like whether or not names and skin colour have any impact on academic performance and reasons for crime drops, etc. Levitt found the answers to these and other questions by turning to statistics.

Is it possible to apply a Freakonomics-style analysis on Kg Ayer's influence on its children's school results? What if we can get access to academic records, say the recently released Penilaian Sekolah Rendah (PSR - Primary School Qualifications) and map out average results by mukim/kg or apply a statistical analysis to find any pattern in performance? Would there be a link? And, if there is one, what factors come into play? Is it distance from land-based services such as tuition schools? Are school management and teachers in Kg Ayer schools responsible?

Perhaps this kind of research has been done already in SHBIE, but thought it would be interesting to bring it up here.