The global pandemic shock that led to school closures, unequal access to technology-based educational facilities, and other disruptions impacted the educational system significantly. IID assessed the learning level and learning loss of children in Bangladesh to understand the impact of external shocks and collect actionable data on learning loss and learning level before the Covid-19 pandemic.
IID conducted a Citizen-Led Assessment (CLA) to assess the basic abilities of children in reading and arithmetic from the age range of 5 to 16 years. The survey sampling was household-based from the Jhenaidah district in 2019 by using the International Common Assessment of Numeracy (ICAN) and ASER literacy tools in collaboration with the People’s Action for Learning (PAL) Network. As the study was conducted right before the pandemic, it provided IID, a unique opportunity to use the findings as baseline data to do a comparative study of the pre-and post-pandemic situation.
In this context, to assess the pandemic effect, another study was conducted to collect end-line data in 2022. The end-line data collection method followed the same data collection procedure of the 2019 study within the same district and the same sample size of 1200 households from 60 villages, with 20 houses randomly chosen from each village.
District-level training was organized to train the surveyors from 1 to 3 December 2022 at the Rural Reconstruction Foundation (RRF), Jessore. The participants of the training were locally recruited 30 field enumerators and 04 district coordinators. The three days long training consisted of two days of in-house sessions and one day of the mock test in the field. The training sessions were about how to use the assessment tool, the village mapping, and household survey processes, the data input system, and the overall data collection procedure.
After the training, the data collection started from 4 to 11 December 2022. During the data collection, the core program management team from IID and the district coordinators assisted the enumerators with the data collection process and monitored the progress in the field.
This endline data will be used to understand the pandemic shock over the education of the learning loss and learning gap in comparison with the baseline data as a panel study. The study is being conducted as a part of the e!quality resilience study with the support of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), in collaboration with Pal Network.
