Impacts of Inequities in Access to Language of Education on Educational Achievement: Evidence from India

• In Event: Language(s) of Instruction: A Discussion of the Academic, Social, and Cultural Complexities of a Contentious Issue

Proposal

With extended school closures and learning loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the current state of learning poverty is estimated to reach 70% of all students across low and middle-income countries (LMICs), and this generation of student’s risk losing $17 trillion in lifetime earnings in present value. This learning crisis is exacerbated by language of instruction issues. An estimated 37% of students in LMICs are still not taught in a language they best understand. An even larger share of students is unprepared to transition to a second language during the primary or middle school years, leading to deep and broad structural inequities in learning in LMIC contexts.

India is a multilingual country and has made progress in developing strong mother tongue (MT) education programming. Research shows that MT-initial instruction increases attendance, improves cost-effectiveness, increases the likelihood of girls and minorities staying in schools, and promulgates better learning outcomes at least through middle school. Despite this evidence and the leaps in advancing MT education in India, the demand to transition to English instruction in earlier and earlier grades is strong, especially given the well-documented link between English and socioeconomic mobility pathways.

Our presentation will aim to provide empirical reconciliation for these language-driven inequities in India’s education system by examining whether—and to what extent—inequitable access to education in languages that children use impacts educational achievement in primary grade children in India. While much is known about the importance of learning in a child’s own language, little is known about the extent to which structural inequities exist in access to education in a child’s own language in India, and how these inequities impact learning. Our primary research question is to estimate the extent to which access to education in the right language predicts educational achievement. Our secondary hypothesis is that a match between medium of instruction and MT in lower grades (i.e., Grade 3), leads to higher achievement scores in higher grades (i.e., Grades 5 and 8). We use quantitative and qualitative data to answer these questions. The quantitative approach focuses on analysis using secondary data from the National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2017 and 2021 in India. NAS is a nationally representative large-scale survey of students’ learning in India administered to children in Grades 3, 5, and 8. NAS 2017 had a sample size of 2.2 million students, whereas NAS 2021 had an approximate sample size of 3 million students from the same grades.

We aim to (a) generate evidence on the extent to which structural inequities in language access influences educational outcomes in India; (b) strengthen key stakeholders’ capacity to apply evidence to intentionally plan how to overcome language-driven inequities in education; and (c) connect the findings (and their implications) to other similar bilingual and multilingual education contexts.

Authors

• Mauricio E. Estrada Matute, American Institutes for Research

• Uttara Balakrishnan, American Institutes for Research

• Pooja Nakamura, American Institutes for Research

• Ozen Guven, American Institutes for Research

• Yasmina Eugenia Haddad, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Chinmaya Holla, American Institutes for Research

• Parul Pandya, American Institutes for Research