One step forward, two steps back: transitions between home, pre-primary and primary education in rural India

A growing evidence base highlights the value of high-quality early childhood education (ECE) to children’s cognitive and social development. However, far less is known about how families and children, especially in developing countries, participate in ECE or how these participation patterns reflect families’ thinking and decision-making. This paper utilises a mixed-methods approach to analyse longitudinal household survey and interview data (on 7,336 and 180 children, respectively) from the India Early Childhood Education Impact study. Our results indicate that children’s participation trajectories in the early years (age 4 to 8) do not reflect the age or grade norms specified by national educational policies. And, far from being linear, children’s educational pathways entail considerable back and forth between home, preschool and school. We argue that these trajectories reflect both poor implementation of national norms as well as an inadequate understanding among both parents and service providers of how best to support young children’s cognitive development.British Association for International and Comparative Educatio

Preferences and skills of Indian public sector teachers

With a sample of 700 future public sector primary teachers in India, a Discrete Choice Experiment is used to measure job preferences, particularly regarding location. General skills are also tested. Urban origin teachers and women are more averse to remote locations than rural origin teachers and men respectively. Women would require a 26-73 percent increase in salary for moving to a remote location. The results suggest that existing caste and gender quotas can be detrimental for hiring skilled teachers willing to work in remote locations. The most preferred location is home, which supports decentralised hiring, although this could compromise skills

Home language, school language and children's literacy attainments: A systematic review of evidence from low‐ and middle‐income countries

The general consensus in the field is that when the home language is different from the language of instruction in school then children's literacy attainments could slow down. In this 26-year review of the literature on children's literacy attainments in low- to middle-income countries, 40 correlational, ethnographic and intervention studies provide the data. We test the ‘home language advantage’ hypothesis where we expect children who speak the same language at home and school to show better literacy learning. We also examine other attributes in the home language and literacy environment (HLLE). Among the multivariate studies, trends differ across countries, age and grade levels, and child measures. Rather than a universal home language advantage, the evidence shows that home language advantage is context-sensitive. The correlational and ethnographic evidence point to a multiple risk factors model of home and school language disconnection; and the ethnographic and intervention studies provide complementary evidence of both feelings of unease, disempowerment and wish to help among family members, and increased confidence following guided support. Possible underlying mechanisms are examined through parallel synthesis of evidence from multiple research methods on three HLLE dimensions—books-at-home, home tutoring and adult literacy practices. The data partially corroborate findings from high-income countries (e.g. home environments impact literacy development, responsive parenting is present across families) but also bring focus on context-specific realities. Neither low-income nor low-print environments are uniform constraints because communities differ and some homes use available resources more efficiently than others

A Multi-Stage Approach to Qualitative Sampling within a Mixed Methods Evaluation: Some Reflections on Purpose and Process

We share experiences from a mixed methods evaluation in rural India that combines a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 400 villages with embedded case studies in four villages. Specifically, we present two lessons from the multi-stage sampling approach adopted to select the four case-study villages, which first prioritized key-informant observations regarding intervention status in order to shortlist locations and subsequently used data from the RCT’s baseline survey to select the final sample. In doing so, we highlight how large-scale mixed methods program evaluations in education can go beyond questions of “what works” to answering those of “how,” “why,” and “why not.