With schools closed now for students in most parts of the world, instruction is being shifted to virtual teaching and learning. For those with greater access to digital resources, this instruction can include the use of digital devices—such as computers, tablets, and smart phones—to connect with students either synchronously or asynchronously using video-enhanced content.
This post is the second in a series we're calling Hacking Tangerine. As we discussed in our first post, Tangerine's flexibility permits a wide variety of clever applications—some obvious, others less so. These posts are intended to highlight a few of the ways Tangerine's core functions are being adapted by enterprising researchers.
Global efforts to change teachers’ behavior in low and middle-income countries have a patchy record. How can we improve the design of new instructional activities such that teachers are more likely to adopt them? One way is to get teachers themselves to do the design.
A couple of weeks ago, we set the stage for developing evidence-based, data-driven answers to questions about learning loss resulting from COVID-19 related school closures. We have now analyzed 27 existing datasets from low and middle income countries (LMICs) to estimate year-on-year growth in student reading achievement under normal conditions, as a starting point for developing models to estimate learning losses (relative to expected growth). Since learning loss will not be equal for all students, we focus on examining full distributions of scores in order to produce more precise estimates than could be obtained by relying only on average change. These analyses have yielded promising evidence of common trends across countries, grades, and languages—leading us toward a new model of estimating loss.
As we all adjust to working from home, we face many challenges, both personal and professional. Yet, we still deliver the work we were contracted to do for our clients and with our partner governments around the world. Therefore, we need to find ways to adapt, shift priorities, and collaborate in new ways in order to effectively implement project activities. A team from RTI International has been working on a series of recommendations, decision-support tools, and step-by-step guides based on their expertise from decades of working with education technologies in low-resource settings.
