This blog intends to inform the Administration of Project Implementation Unit (PIU), Third Primary Education Development Program (PEDP III) of Directorate of Primary Education.The PIU is a key stakeholder who oversees the overall operation and monitors performances of Bangladeshi Primary school students and teachers.
This blog is for introducing a coming research project titled ‘Towards a research project ‘Effectiveness of digital content for improving reading competency of rural Bangladeshi primary school learners’.
Technology is believed to be a tool in the educational arena with high end result developing students’ higher level of literacy skills. Thus, all over the world, technology appears as a strong and updated tool among teachers, administrators and policy makers.
In Bangladesh, where we can see inadequate English content for teaching and learning primary school English teachers, it is a debate on the quality improvement of students’ English reading skill ability. Moreover, in a single classroom it is difficult to cater the need of both lower and higher-achieving students to track progress on their reading ability.
In these circumstances, technology can provide individualized feedback through artificially intelligent, animated avatars, text-to-speech, visual information other than text like pictures (Biancarosa and Griffiths, 2012).. Therefore, The Government of Bangladesh's Third Primary Education Development Program (PEDP III) has been providing required support . However, within the strength and weakness of this intervention, we really do not get concrete evidence to claim the success of primary school students’ reading skills. Therefore, the research question in line with this research has been decided as:
‘Can using digital content aid the achievement of English reading objectives in rural Bangladeshi primary schools?
Needless to mention that this twelve months long research project will focus on the rural primary students and aim to find the actual competency of reading skill of the primary school students who are currently using digital content as supplementary material. The output of this study might help the curriculum developers, material developers, representatives and administrators who are responsible for primary school to decide on their future plan with primary education. For successful execution of this project initially a stakeholder analysis has been done and required documents will be provided to the respective units of DPE before the research, during and at the end of this research.
To conduct this research Experimental and Descriptive approaches are considered and where EGRA toolkit will be used which was used earlier to measure the competency of Bangla skill at primary level and which is flexible and a proven tool . Lastly, this research project will just focus on students’ English reading competency and will not go for any appraisal of the recent intervention of DPE and PIU. Moreover, required ethical consideration will be maintained not to disclose any personal or organizational information throughout this research. Hence, a strong administrative support is required for implementation of this research.
Reference:
Biancarosa G. and Gina G. Griffiths G.G., (2012) ‘Technology Tools to Support Reading in the Digital Age, The Future of Children’, vol. 22, no. 2, Literacy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century, pp. 139-160.[ online]. Available at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ996196.pdf