Impact of school system, teaching and assessment on girl students' dropout in Nepal: a systematic review

Context: Various studies have looked at various aspects of girl students’ schooling outcome and the issue of dropout. In this paper I aim systematically organise, summarise and examine critically at the relevant articles/books’ methods of inquiry and findings and see how these studies provide framework for my proposed research.

Objective: The objective of this review is to find the answer to the following questions:
• To what extent and effect have the previous studies addressed the issue of girl students’ dropout in Nepal and other parts of the world?
• What aspects of the issue, which could be crucial in dealing girl students’ schooling, retention and dropout, has not been covered by these studies.

Method: The search for the studies, which focused on girl students’ schooling and the issue of dropout in high schools, was conducted in February 2014 and continued for months. A structured search strategy was used, first by formulating the key words and word combinations, then selecting the databases and search engines. The literature extracted from the pool of hits were categorised as ‘relevant on first sight’ based on the word combinations in the titles. The abstracts were read and further screening was carried out. Then ‘most relevant’ ones were selected for detail literature review. The duplication was omitted and 14 articles were selected for review at the end.

Conclusion: School dropout is a serious social educational problem. In Nepal where a large chunk of population is out of the sphere of educational activities, and where female literacy rate has never been at par with male literacy, the girl students face more impediments than the male students do. The opportunities for the girls are scarce. So, in addition to many other socio-cultural factors, direct and indirect educational costs come in the way of girl students’ education (Stash and Hannum, 2010). This literature review examines what has been contributed to this area so far and what needs to be done.