Empowering teachers in Ethiopian primary education to stimulate executive functions in their students as a prerequisite for academic achievement and future success

With around 42 million citizens under the age of 14 years, efforts to improve Ethiopian education have a huge potential for social, political and economic change. Unfortunately, the performance of students in primary education and the pedagogical skills of teachers fail to meet the standards set by the Ministry of Education (2015). We put forward two overlooked opportunities in the current national Education Sector Development Programme to increase both children’s academic performance and teachers' pedagogical skills. First, current actions are not backed by direct training of children’s domain-general skills such as executive functions (EF) which are a dominant predictor of academic achievement (Diamond, 2013). Second, we will train pre- and in-service teachers in teacher-student interactions (TSI) to establish the most optimal classroom context in which EF can thrive in children with and without special educational needs (Vandenbroucke et al., 2017). Multiple designs (systematic review, document analysis, questionnaire development and randomized controlled trial of an EF x TSI intervention) and close collaboration with local instances will assure the feasibility of the design and the ecological validity of the project outcomes.