Reach to Teach project, RCT, has been initiated by World Bank to focus on building teachers content knowledge and pedagogical skills and SEDP actively supported the project thoroughly. ARCED has been working tirelessly with Agami Foundation and Muktopath to implement the study by collecting quality data country widely from grade-6 mathematics teachers.
Due to COVID-19 situation, educational institutions have been closed for the longest time in the history of Bangladesh. However, government of Bangladesh wants to turn the pause into an opportunity to provide practical distance-training to school teachers.
Because of widespread reputation of ineffective teachers training program, low-cost incentives like recognition award and certificates are introduced to motivate teachers to take the training more seriously and advanced the efficacy of the virtual training.
Under this project, virtual teachers training will be implemented for mathematics teachers of secondary schools and this training is focused on building teachers content knowledge and pedagogical skills. Therefore, Government of Bangladesh and World Bank have been working in collaboration to implement this project. And ARCED Foundation has been working in this project since the very beginning stage, Pre-screening.
At first stage of this project, ARCED has conducted a 15-minute phone based CATI survey with 27000 teachers (phone number was provide by World Bank) to collect basic information to construct a sampling frame.
From 27000 teachers, ARCED could able to identify 1800 grade-6 mathematics teachers from all over the country. With these 1800 mathematics teachers, base-line survey has been started and the responsibilities of conducting phone surveys to reconfirm email address and Muktapath ID of the teachers are given to ARCED Foundation.
For making these two-stage successful, ARCED has developed training materials, field protocols, and manuals for the enumerators with the close collaboration of Principal Investigators to implement the surveys smoothly on virtual platform.
ARCED has been also responsible for developing and maintaining SurveyCTO web-based baseline survey and exam toolkit for the phone surveys. To ensure the quality work, STATA-based High-Frequency Checks (HFC) has been automatically scrutinized data every day along with data management, cleaning, and merging multiple datasets of this study using Stata by the R&D team of ARCED and an automated data quality reports has also provided to the clients. In intervention stage, ARCED actively has been supporting Agami Foundation and A2i to implement the virtual training and providing all type of technical support to the teachers to ensure their participation in the virtual training.
Follow-up phone calls have been made regularly to the teachers who could not participate the virtual training for different reasons.
REACH TO TEACH is still an ongoing project which started in January, 2021 and so ARCED will be playing its own unique role in mid-line and end-line study.