Enhancing Teacher Support of Students in an After-School Remediation Program in Senegal with Behavioral Science

• In Event: Applying Behavioral Science to Improve Teacher Uptake of Pedagogical Best Practices for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in Sub-Saharan Africa and India

Proposal

In 2022, ARED launched Ndaw Wune, an after-school remediation program aimed at improving FLN outcomes among second and third graders in Senegal. The program trains public school teachers in a new methodology known as differentiated pedagogy in leveled smaller groups. This methodology requires teachers to adopt new teaching practices, such as grouping students by their proficiency levels in reading and math (rather than by age) and providing support to multiple groups of students in the same classroom. Teachers follow a guide that provides daily lesson plans for one group of students per class (the relearning group), whereas the other groups (the autonomous groups) work more independently using student workbooks.

30 in-depth interviews with teachers and 10 classroom observations revealed that teachers were not providing adequate support to all groups of students. Instead, they primarily focused on the relearning group, spending insufficient time with and offering limited support to the autonomous groups. Students in the program generally spend at least half of their time in autonomous groups, equating to at least three out of six hours of instruction each week. Receiving insufficient support from teachers while in autonomous groups resulted in many of these students being off-task, or not engaged in learning, for a significant portion of class time. This hindered students’ ability to benefit fully from the program and improve their FLN skills.

Our initial research also highlighted four behavioral barriers that impeded teachers from providing enough support to autonomous groups; one being that teachers lack clear guidelines and reminders for how much and when to provide support to these groups. Based on these insights, we designed a suite of solutions to specifically address these barriers. For example, we created a checklist outlining what tutors should do before, at the start of, and during class, including how to allocate their time between and provide support to the different groups. This was integrated into the existing teacher guide and was accompanied by visual reminders in the guide’s lesson plans to rotate to the autonomous groups.

We evaluated this suite of solutions through a randomized controlled trial involving all 200 Ndaw Wune teachers. Teachers were randomized into two groups: a treatment group that received the package of behaviorally designed solutions, and a control group that received the original training and materials.

Results from the evaluation indicate that the behavioral interventions increased both the amount and quality of support that tutors provided to autonomous groups. Teachers in the treatment group spent 2 minutes and 47 seconds longer on average with the autonomous groups than those in the control group. They also performed 0.5 more quality rotations to autonomous groups (meaning that when they were with these groups, they engaged in behaviors like checking students’ work and offering positive reinforcement).

During our presentation at CIES, we will present these results in greater detail and discuss our recommendations for organizations or ministries of education implementing FLN programs that utilize teaching methodologies with multiple groups of students in the same classroom.

Authors

• Katherine Flaschen, ideas42

• Mamadou Ly, Associates in Research and Education for Development

• Kate Rinehart-Smit, ideas42