Events

Joint work with: Deepak Kumar, Naveen Sunder, Wilima Wadhwa, Suman Bhattacharjea

Abstract:  India has achieved near universal access to primary education, however, many children are attending schools and failing to achieve foundational literacy and numeracy skills. According to the ASER Centre (2018), almost half the students in fifth grade could not read a text at the grade 2 level, and nearly 73 percent of them could not solve a simple division question. In this presentation, we examine the role of community participation, particularly enhancing school and community involvement in activities to foster children’s learning.  The research is based on a randomized controlled trial whereby 400 villages of Sitapur were randomly divided into three groups: 100 villages for a community intervention (T1), 200 villages for a community and school intervention (T2), and 100 villages as a control group.  During the presentation we will engage critically with the challenges of undertaking research and how the team had to adapt methods and tools to adhere with local realities.  In terms of findings, both arms of the intervention have significantly improved the children’s foundational literacy and numeracy skills as compared to the control group. We find evidence of significant improvement in the higher level of literacy and numeracy skills, which are relatively difficult to achieve. Yet, we do not find evidence of heterogeneous impact by gender. Particularly important, the community-school treatment has a significantly higher impact (provides additional impact, particularly for higher skills) on those children whose parents were involved in their education at home and school. This impact was potentially driven by activities to promote greater school attendance for children, as well as those that enhance the involvement of parents with children’s learning in schools and at home.  During the discussion, we will focus on the implications of this research in view of the challenges presented by climate change, political instability and the pandemic. 

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Mollie Fee and Mobarak Hossain.  For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.