A Decade with AIF

Receiving the Award from Ravi

I completed a decade with the American India Foundation on the 1st of September 2014. My memory goes back to 25th of June 2004 when we had the first meeting with the APC and Secretary School and Mass Education Dept., where the intervention was approved in principle and September 2004 when the MoU was signed by the then State Project Director Santosh Sarangi. Personally for me it has been a great journey and I have learnt a lot. For a person who had never wanted to work in Odisha, I am amazed and at times shocked at how fast a decade has passed. In fact I had been so involved with my program giving my heart and soul to it and having literally ate, slept and dreamt about the program all the time, coupled with a great team who have continued with me for so long, that I have literally  and never realized as to when a decade had slipped away. 

Core Group Meeting, Bangalore

I feel the program has not only provided a platform  for me but for all the team members, to unleash their creativity, tap their potential and significantly increase their knowledge and understanding as far as how learning happens, and the centrality of techno-pedagogy / instructional design in increasing learning outcomes is concerned. This knowledge will last a lifetime.

From the time we started in 2004 the program has undergone a lot of changes with the major inflection in 2010 when we introduced the "centralized training model" to learning achievement tracking

from 2013 on wards.

I was given the "long service award" by Ravi Kumar, CEO AIF in Bangalore as part of the DE Core Group meeting, held in the month of June 2014. Seriously I never expected an award for something which is so integrally interwoven with my life but then an award always makes one feel good - as after all I am but a fragile human being.

Workshop on Financial Literacy IIMA

Workshop in Progress

I was in IIM Ahmedabad in July to attend a workshop on "Designing Financial Literacy Programs" which was organized by Prof. Baruah and Shobhesh Agarwala. I was pretty much impressed by the design of the workshop and the way it was conducted. The research that was carried out by IIMA on designing effective intervention tools for FL shows that a combination of training plus videos proved to be most effective as far as retention is concerned. Being financially literate requires not only knowledge of the concept but also use of various financial instruments leading to inculcation of the desired habits which in turn leads to attitudinal change in the long run. One of the presenters in the workshop "Tamol Bandhopadhyay," "Executive Editor Live Mint," Mumbai did drive home a crucial point: he mentioned that we are generally wrong in thinking that individuals living below the poverty line lack knowledge of FL. That is one of those "partial truths which begets total errors." He gave an example of his driver whose home he once happened to visit and was amazed to find that he saved money that he earned from different types of work such as salary, money for taking the dog for a walk, extra money for over time etc. into different containers with different labels such as health, education, general expenses etc. He sent money back home located in far away Nepal from these savings. Tamol took the first step by bringing his driver within the formal banking system by opening two recurring deposit accounts for him with the State Bank of India, which he still maintains.

IIMA

We as part of the DE intervention in Odisha are rolling out a pilot FL program in all the 100 government schools spread across 6 districts and Tamol's point will always be a guiding statement for me. Whether it is adults or children all of us are pretty much aware of the concepts of earning, saving, spending, budgeting, investment etc. (which comprise the core of FL ) and make use of them in some rudimentary form as part of their day to day lives. The only problem being that most of the sophisticated concepts that we use to describe the same cannot capture these rudimentary forms of the same. We need to take cognizance of this fact while designing our FL interventions.

Steve Jobs

Click on the link below to watch one of the most inspirational videos that I have seen - Steve Jobs speech at Stanford.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO6cFMRqXqU

Mid-Line Study DE Program Odisha

We just completed the mid-line study report and it took almost close to two and a half months to shift through the massive amount of data generated as part of the study. The study was administered in February 2014. The results are interesting and extremely motivating for me and my team members. Although I had expected an increase of about 10% in student learning outcomes in mathematics, science and geography the results show an increase in the range 25%-30% in the first year itself. The results have been shared with the School and Mass Education Department, Govt. of Odisha. They are interested in integrating the learnings as part of their mathematics and science module development. The study shows a very strong correlation between the DE methodology (Edukit usage, e-Samdhan, collaborative projects, Flipped Classroom methodology, regular coaching and mentoring of teachers by DE resource persons through regular school visits) and the top three performance areas in science, mathematics and geography in case of treatment I schools which clearly brings to light the impact of the DE Program.

As far as grade VI is concerned there has been a 29% increase in average scores (maths, science and geography combined). Similarly in case of grade VII there has been a 23% increase in average scores (maths, science and geography combined). Click on the link below to access the complete report.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BymNjPjjdn8yMWM4V1ZTMzdHNDA/edit

Learning Achievement Levels in Govt. Schools

I am returning back to writing on my blog after a long time and that too with something as serious and complex as "learning achievement levels of kids in government schools." The topic has become a toast for the nation's intelligentsia and strangely eludes an easy solution. As part of my program intervention in government schools in Odisha we did a learning achievement baseline study and the results are interesting. I thought it will be interesting to share the challenges and the key insights thrown up by this study. This study was conducted with more than 5000 students in  87 government upper primary schools spread across six districts of Odisha.

Challenges and Key Insights 

A bottom heavy structure with a large number of students in the lower performing brackets is the main challenge. Almost all of them are back benchers, having very low self-esteem and in need of remediation. Classroom observations show that teachers also are reinforcing the status quo by focussing on the front benchers only. Just training and sensitizing them will not work. Teachers need to be coached and mentored at the school level and constantly sensitized to the fact that they should not be neglecting the back benchers. Equity is the need of the hour and it should be ensured that not only the quality of instruction improves but it also reaches each and every single child.

While the best performing school systems in the world manage to stay at the top by following a beginning of the pipe approach by carefully selecting, meticulously training and grooming the candidates for the job of a teacher, we on the contrary follow an end of the pipe approach by trying to remedy a situation whereby a large chunk of people who do not have any aptitude for teaching, end up as contractual teachers. Entering the teaching profession is an option of the last resort. This has sadly made teaching a low status profession in India, where teaching figures somewhere down the list, as a career option for the young generation. This has created a vicious cycle in that the low status of the profession sends a market signal which attracts poor quality candidates or candidates who take to teaching as a profession of the last resort. Add to this the poor quality of teaching in the teacher training institutes where the trainees do not get much of a practical exposure to teaching at the school level. In addition to that there are a large number of untrained teachers also at the school level.

 

HSBC Climate Partnership

HSBC Climate Partnership

A very innovative and admired corporate-NGO partnership

Is making mistakes an essential part of learning

The answer is yes. A study led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this essential part of learning “making mistakes” and how it helps one in learning faster. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes than others? After all everybody screws up. But what follows is important. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error seeking to learn from the snafu?

The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroencephalography (EEG). The first reaction is known as error related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behaviour, anticipate rewards and regulate attention. This neural reaction is mostly involuntary, the inevitable response to any screw-up. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

In this new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain, both of which appear in less than half a second. More specifically, the scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. In her influential research, Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mind-set — they tend to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it” — and those with a growth mind-set, who believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mind-set see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mind-set see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.

The experiment began with a flanker task, a tedious assignment in which subjects are supposed to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series, such as “MMMMM” or “NNMNN.” Sometimes the middle letter is the same as the other four, and sometimes it’s different. This simple change induces frequent mistakes, as the boring task encourages people to zone out. Once they make a mistake, of course, they immediately regret it. There is no excuse for misidentifying a letter.

While performing the flanker task, subjects wore an EEG cap, a monitoring device filled with greased electrodes that records electrical activity in the brain. (Unlike fMRI, EEG gives researchers excellent temporal resolution, allowing them to precisely measure a sequence of neural events. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of spatial resolution, making it difficult to know where in the brain the signals are coming from.)

It turned out that those subjects with a growth mind-set were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. As a result, they showed a spike in accuracy immediately following an error. Most interesting, though, was the EEG data, which demonstrated that those with a growth mind-set generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes. (While those with an extremely fixed mind-set generated a Pe amplitude around five, those with a growth mind-set were closer to fifteen.) What’s more, this increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.