As schools seek to improve learning, many are moving towards sophisticated and high-stakes testing regimes. What isn't tested doesn't matter. To sharpen the focus on the competencies demanded by tests, schools are devoting an ever-greater share of resources to a few, basic subject areas, while reducing - even eliminating - time spent on subjects not tested. A casualty among these has been physical education. This brief summarizes the evidence against this trend.

In 2010, the IDB published The Imperative of Innovation, a survey of the status of science, technology, and innovation in the Latin American and Caribbean region. The regions technological progress was found to be uneven and insufficient, especially in relation to other regions of the world. The main purposes of this document are to present updated information and to introduce some of the new research and policy know-how accumulated in the course of IDB lending and technical assistance operations in science, technology, and innovation.

Guatemala is facing a health paradox. On the one hand, chronic child malnutrition rates are worse than those in Africa, and are quadruple the average rates for Latin America. On the other hand, obesity and overweight affect half of the country's women, and anemia has also increased at an alarming rate. The study addresses the topic of malnutrition in an innovative and pragmatic way and provides key recommendations for implementing much-needed nutrition interventions in Guatemala.

This Technical Note describes the learning inequalities faced by Colombian students and analyzes the equity in the allocation of resources among schools and their relation to learning. Using the SABER 2009database, the analysis demonstrates that there are high inequalities in students' academic results associated with their families' socioeconomic status, the type of school management, and the school's geographic zone. This relation is more important between schools than within a school, denoting a high degree of segregation of Colombian schools according to students' socioeconomic status.

This study explores the state of infrastructure in the region's primary education schools, using the SERCE database, and analyzes the connection between school infrastructure conditions and language and mathematics tests results for third and sixth grade students.