Off-Campus Portion for Testing the Effectiveness of Tailored Non-Formal Education Interventions Promoting Critical Thinking and Emotional Literacy in the Middle East

The broad objectives of our proposal are first to evaluate the barriers that have limited the success of non-formal education (NFE) across the Middle East and North Africa, particularly as applies to critical thinking and emotional literacy, by jointly developing a battery of questions to be included on nationally representative public opinion surveys, and second to use this information to design interventions on critical thinking and emotional literacy that are tailored to specific regions and conditions, and to test the effectiveness of these interventions. We hypothesize that interventions that have taken local knowledge and attitudes into consideration in their design will be more successful than standard interventions. Our goal is to be able to design specific interventions that are tailored to specific countries and, as possible, sub-regions of countries. Thus, we will test the effectiveness for direct interventions in Jordan and Lebanon that could be scaled to other parts of the region, including Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza, Algeria, and Tunisia in the future.