Peru's Ministry of Education has partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and LEGO Education to develop a program that helps children improve their ability to solve scientific problems using a set of curriculum materials that is affordable and can be brought to a national scale. Working in teams on problems that capture their interest, students devise solutions, reflect on what they build while solving the problem, and apply what they have learned to new challenges. This brief describes a pilot initiative and its evaluation design and baseline.

This document presents a preliminary findings about "One Laptop per Child" program in Peru. On the one hand, were find evidence of better attitudes and expectations among teachers and parents; students that are more critical of school work and of their own performance; and a greater development of technological skills among girls and boys. On the other hand, there seems to be a decrease in the intensity of computer use in the classroom, as time passes and difficulties arise in the implementation of the project.

That four- and five-year-olds can do algebra, arithmetic, and geometry may be hard to believe. But if you visit a preschool classroom in the Cordillera region of Paraguay, you will see children who learn factoring by organizing balls and sticks into groups, and who work together to form pentagons and hexagons with their bodies. These children are participating in a project called "Tikichuela, Mathematics in My School", the result of a partnership between the Japanese and Paraguayan governments, the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Elige Educar is a Chilean public-private initiative that seeks to improve the appreciation of teachers and encourage high-performing students to study education by means of media campaigns, talks to secondary school students and scholarships to study education. This bulletin summarizes the preliminary results, which are encouraging and lead us to believe that, through programs like this, it is possible to improve the social value given to teachers and to change the academic profile of future teachers in the region.

This note summarizes, as told from their personal experiences, the transition process of young people, mostly non-teachers, recruited by Enseña Perú to serve as teachers for a period of two years in vulnerable schools in Peru. The results shed light on the difficulties that are faced in the complex transition to teaching and how different mechanisms could facilitate this transition.

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.

Education quality can be measured in various ways, including the analysis of learning and other outcomes in children and through the analysis of underlying services. In Brazil, a collaborative endeavor between the IDB, the Ministry of Education and the Carlos Chagas Foundation focuses on the latter. This brief details the processes and results to date.

There is a chance that by 2015, 30 million students in Latin America may have an electronic device for personal use devoted to aid in their learning. This represents an enormous educational challenge.

Chilean students perform poorly in international learning assessments, and the achievement gap between income groups is large. To remedy this situation, the Inter-American Development Bank is supporting a program, Enseña Chile, that recruits top university graduates and places them for two years in the most vulnerable schools.

Mexican students score low in international learning assessments, particularly in math. To help remedy this situation, the Inter-American Development Bank is supporting a pilot study to identify to what extent performance based incentives for students, teachers and principals in upper-secondary schools can improve students¿ mathematical skills, as measured by their scores in curriculum-based mathematics tests.