If education quality is largely dependent on the teaching capacity of educators, wouldn’t integrating video instruction from expert teachers into low-resource schools’ curricula seem like a good idea?

Digital StudyHall (DSH), a program that has pioneered Facilitated Video Instruction for primary school education in low-resource settings since 2005, might seem revolutionary to the improvement of education quality in theory.  However, a team of researchers from the University of Washington and the StudyHall Educational Foundation recently completed a two-year study in government primary schools in Northern India which concluded that might not be the case.

The Facilitated Video Instruction in Low Resource Schools report detailing the study and research results was presented at the International conference on information and communication technologies and development (ICT4D2012) last Tuesday in Atlanta, and offers valuable insight into the core challenges that prevent the project’s scalability and sustainability, as well as a few lessons that the whole ICT4E sector could benefit from.

Over the course of two years, researchers observed and compared the use of DSH in eleven schools on the outskirts of a large city in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, one of the most populated and least developed provinces in India.  With the approval of the Indian government and while adhering to the national curriculum, the team introduced video recordings of high-performing teachers into low-performing classrooms and conducted quantitative and qualitative studies to measure the impact of this educational intervention.  The team also held technical training seminars for participating teachers and helped establish electrical connections to support the TVs and DVD players.

Setting out, the researchers expected to see positive quantitative results in student competencies and noticeable improvements in the participating teachers’ teaching skills. However, within this cultural context, a number of variables such as student test scores heavily influenced by cheating and a large number of student and teacher absences during harvest seasons, prevented the researchers from collecting reliable quantitative data.

Though the researchers saw positive improvements in some of the participating teachers’ pedagogy during DSH and throughout the rest of their teaching — based primarily on their ability to use the interactive teaching methods displayed by the model teachers in the videos — other teacher’s were not receptive to working with DSH staff and two schools had to drop from the program due to theft of equipment.

So while the report ultimately concludes that the project is not sustainable in this particular context, at least not without substantial support from outside organizations, here’s a few lessons we can take away from this project:

• Teacher buy-in is essential. The major contributor to successful programs in the study was having at least one motivated staff member who was passionate about teaching, as well as having support from strong school leadership.

• It is critical that all of the participants — teachers, principals, students — view the educational intervention as valuable relative to available options.  This should help to ensure sustainability and reduce incidents of equipment theft.

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  Photo Credit: Teach for India

  The main obstacle to scalability is the educator’s view of their profession and personal teaching capacity, as well as their commitment to education.  Teachers must value their role as an educator in order to have incentive to continue to grow professionally and use effective teaching strategies.

• Educational context matters.  The content and format of the lessons should reflect the cultural context in which they are used.  In other words, is it appropriate for the target audience considering what teaching methods they are already familiar with?  In a context like India’s where the teaching profession is respected in the community but is divided between credentialed teachers and paraeducators, what are the impacts of introducing a teaching aid that might undermine the efficacy of a teacher’s previous training and teaching skills?

• The improvement of the participating teacher’s pedagogy is essential and progress should be continually monitored.  Teachers should show progress in using student-centered teaching methodologies to be considered effective.  For example, do they ask questions and initiate discussion? Do they check for student understanding?

• Programs of this kind should supplement a teacher’s instruction, not replace it.  A teacher can learn just as much as the students can from educational videos — especially if they have not received the proper training for teaching their assigned subject — but without improving the teacher’s teaching strategies, the project’s overall goal cannot be achieved.

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  Photo Credit: www.mtestsite.com

  Socio-economic issues can indirectly be addressed within video content.  The report notes that the students in the videos were all girls and came from poor, urban backgrounds.  The participating students responded well to their video peers, sometimes interacting with them, like clapping for their video peers who answered a question correctly, small details that can have positive lasting effects. (A recent blog entitled What Sesame Street Can Teach the World Bank by Michael Trucano, offers additional lessons in developing this kind of valuable video content)