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August 17, 2007
Data in the classroom?
After almost two months at Akshara I can finally claim to have interacted with at least a few people at almost all levels of the system; the core of KLP, teachers, the most recent addition to my list of people I’ve pestered with questions. I had the opportunity to test out my survey with teachers for the first time. Aside from that, I also had the chance to start working with quantitative data.
One thing I noticed, as I worked on a random sample for auditing the math programme and calculated predicted numbers of children that would enter the KLP statewide programme in September, was how immediately useful quantitative data can be in planning. Suddenly, Stata was a boon, and simple enrollment information could reveal a lot about the system. For example, as I looked through the Karnataka data, I found a stark decrease in enrollment from Class 1 to Class 8; in some blocks, this drop in enrollment was particularly pronounced for girls.
Yet the usefulness of quantitative data did not change the fact that there were strange disconnects between quantitative and qualitative information. For example, as I interviewed teachers, I realized how difficult it can be to gain complete qualitative information as an outside observer. The teachers in the schools I visited thanked me profusely for the programme’s existence, though I had nothing to do with it; they balked at my question about what could be eliminated from the math kit, perhaps because they would rather not lose any resources, even if they don’t use all of them. The teachers seemed committed, of course, and children seemed happy – in some cases, to such an extent that I wondered if it was hopeless to train teachers, if really only changing their home environments would make a long-run impact on their performance.
However, though my position as an outside observer, connected to Akshara and perceived as a person with power, made it difficult to tell how authentic the information I was receiving was, there were still something jarring about the contrast between the qualitative and the quantitative. For me, this observation reinforced the importance of triangulation – looking at the same issue from multiple viewpoints. One teacher told me, for example, that the final results in her school from the reading programme came out badly because that day, inexplicably, all the children who had been attending the programme and a new set of children happened to come to school. Though this might have been an exaggeration, I couldn’t help but wonder how well our assesssments really reflect the benefits of our programmes.
Out of this teacher’s comment, I also noticed her deep desire to impress me with the performance of her children. While I observed her class, she asked me over and over whether they were doing well. To her, assessment was not something she could use -- it was only something that could either validate or invalidate her work. Early this week, I presented my theory of change model to the KLP coordinators. Many of the resulting comments were about data use: how could data be made into something that people could use at all levels? Where was data feeding back into the system? In this teacher’s case, data was a yes-or-no question: did they do well? Did they not? If one of the aims of KLP is to shift the system into thinking about data as a useful tool, it may prove extremely difficult to ignite that shift among teachers who are used to being constantly evaluated on summative terms.
Posted by gowriv at August 17, 2007 12:11 PM