3MPower

Overview

The study explored the use of technology for teachers’ professional development (TPD) and its impact on learning of numeracy skills in primary schools in Bangladesh, looking at marginalisation through the lenses of geography (i.e., low-income rural communities) and gender (i.e., female teachers and learners). It mainly studied at-scale TPD courses provided via Muktopaath, a Bangla-language e-Learning platform used by 400,000+ teachers. It focused on courses to improve the teaching and learning of numeracy in primary education (grades 1 to 8), notably Anonde Gonit Shikhi (Let's learn Maths with fun) which was completed by over 175,000 primary teachers. The following cross-cutting themes were addressed in this study:

● Scale and sustainability - target programmes require teachers to use their mobile phones to access content for TPD.

 ● Context - the study focused on school-level realities; it used peer researchers (female primary teachers in rural schools) to gather research data through conversational interviews with other community members and put great emphasis on engagement with stakeholders in knowledge co-creation.

● Equity - every aspect was considered through lenses of equity and gender. Every school and teacher involved in the project was selected from marginalised or low-income communities.

● Learning outcomes – the team agreed on the instruments and learning outcomes with stakeholders, to ensure they were relevant and culturally and politically acceptable.

Key findings and impacts

Teachers only put AGS into practice in some schools (estimated <10%), where the school community encouraged practical exploration of the AGS activities in lessons. In those schools, the following impacts were seen on teaching and learning:

1.      Impacts on teaching:

a.      ‘Ongoing AGS users’ said there had been important changes in their understanding and

practice, and lesson observations showed several modest but significant improvements in

teaching practice, compared to other teachers.

b.      There was little or no change in some important areas of teaching, limiting learners’

abilities to develop their understanding of numeracy through talking about their ideas.

2.      Impacts on learning:

a.      Numeracy outcomes among rural learners remain low, regardless of whether teachers

were ‘ongoing AGS users’ or not.

b.      At every level, learners whose teachers were ‘ongoing AGS users’ were more successful

than the learners of other teachers.

The role of IET

Prof Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and Dr Saraswati Dawadi in IET led one of the streams of the project which focused on equitable access to digital technology for TPD.

Impact

The research team worked in collaboration with the key stakeholders responsible for online professional development (A2i) and face-to-face training (Directorate of Primary Education) in Bangladesh, throughout the research lifecycle. This culminated in the co-production of four policy-briefs with and for stakeholders, identifying key learnings and recommendations for those organisations.