The need of the hour: Scaling Targeted Instruction in post-COVID Pakistan

Group Submission Type: Refereed Roundtable Session

Proposal

Despite a rise in school enrollments, a learning crisis plagues the Pakistani education system where most students lack foundational skills even after a number of years in school. Low average learning and high learning inequality, especially at the primary level, have worsened globally because of COVID-induced household shocks and school closures. The great variation in parental capability to facilitate learning from home also exacerbated ‘within the classroom’ learning inequality. Now, more than ever, teachers will find it difficult to keep all the children in their classrooms learning at the same pace given the exacerbated ‘within the classroom’ learning inequality. Research on the aftermath of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake shows alarming evidence of learning losses induced by school closures. Four years after the disaster, children who lived close to the fault line faced 1.5 to 2 years of learning loss after only 14 weeks of school closures. Children of educated mothers were better able to mitigate these learning losses as compared to children whose mothers were not educated; the latter typically belonging to low socioeconomic status households. Learning losses compounded once students returned to schools, resulting in 90% of the drop in the student test scores. The inability of schools to re-calibrate curriculum and instruction to student learning needs is speculated to have resulted in compounded learning losses over time, leading to long-term implications for students’ education and life outcomes.

This evidence makes it clear that if the pandemic-induced losses are not mitigated, they will compound over time causing children, particularly from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, to perform poorly, disengage and even drop out. There has thus been a global push towards latching on to COVID-19 as a pivot to an opportunity to “build back better” post-COVID education systems; at the centre of which is aggressive remedial interventions focused on the prioritization of foundational skills in post-COVID primary schools. One such effective remedial intervention is Targeted Instruction (TI) that uses assessments to tailor instruction to student learning level (versus age or grade level).

This roundtable will highlight the development, implementation and upcoming impact evaluation of a specially designed, low-cost technology-enabled Targeted Instruction Program (TIP) in over 1000 public, private and non-government primary schools in Pakistan. TIP is envisioned to support existing teachers in helping catch up primary students to their grade level through the acquisition of basic literacy and numeracy skills. The session will discuss different contours of TIP with the aim to circulate a plethora of insights and learnings acquired in the first year of program launch. The roundtable sessions will explain how TIP is different to other tried and tested TI interventions that have shown promise in developing country settings. Presenters will also offer tactical advice on what teacher support tools (such as assessments and teaching materials) are required to administer TIP in schools, how they are developed, and how technology can be leveraged to ease the administrative burden on teachers. The roundtable will touch upon the rigorous policy engagement carried out at different tiers of the provincial and federal education ministries to embed TIP in the public education system and create system alignment around the mission to teach to the student level at the primary level. The session will deliberate with participants on the question of how TIP can be unbundled into different elements that are packaged together in different combinations to design a minimum viable product of TIP that can be scaled at the system level across Pakistan.

Sub Unit

• South Asia SIG

Chair

• Tahir Andrabi, Pomona College

Individual Presentations

• Scaling post-COVID Targeted Instruction in budget-constrained education systems - Isabel Macdonald, University of California Berkeley

• The role of curriculum, assessments and tech in targeting instruction to the student learning level - Zainab Qureshi, Harvard Kennedy School; Noam Angrist, Young 1ove Organization

• The political economy of implementing Targeted Instruction in public schools in Pakistan - Maleeha Hameed, Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan; Juan David Baron, The World Bank