Your search

Head Start emphasises parent engagement as a critical strategy in promoting children's long-term learning. Parents can support children's positive development by engaging them in stimulating activities. The following study assessed whether a service that delivered parenting tips via text message could prompt parents of children enrolled in Head Start programmes to engage in more learning activities with their children. Two hundred and fifty-six parents participated in the study with...

Several years into a collaborative professional development programme to build the Leadership for Learning capacity of Basic school headteachers throughout Ghana, the challenge is to sustain commitment, deepen understanding and share learning among the school leaders. Employing ubiquitous mobile phone technology, weekly text messages have been sent to the programme's 175 initial participants. During the year of the pilot project different forms of messages have been tried, and feedback from...

Developing sustainable and scalable educational initiatives is a key challenge in low-income countries where donor-funded short-term projects are limited by both contextual factors and programme design. In this concept paper we examine some of the issues related to in-service teacher development in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, grounded predominantly in our experiences of over 5 years of iteratively developing, refining and evaluating an intensive school-based professional learning...

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has shown considerable promise, but thus far the literature has tended to focus on individual technological tools, without due regard for how the choice of one such tool over another impacts CSCL, either in outline or in detail. The present study, therefore, directly compared the learning-related uses of an online discussion forum against such use of a mobile instant-messaging app by the same group of 78 upper-division undergraduate...

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has shown considerable promise, but thus far the literature has tended to focus on individual technological tools, without due regard for how the choice of one such tool over another impacts CSCL, either in outline or in detail. The present study, therefore, directly compared the learning-related uses of an online discussion forum against such use of a mobile instant-messaging app by the same group of 78 upper-division undergraduate...

Reduction of teacher and student absenteeism, together with consistent teacher support and training, are critical factors in improving the quality of education in rural India. As part of an ongoing project involving schools and educational centers in rural areas spread across 21 Indian states, this study investigated how implementation of two simple, accessible technologies could not only reduce absenteeism but also increase teachers' effectiveness and improve student performance. In...

Reduction of teacher and student absenteeism, together with consistent teacher support and training, are critical factors in improving the quality of education in rural India. As part of an ongoing project involving schools and educational centers in rural areas spread across 21 Indian states, this study investigated how implementation of two simple, accessible technologies could not only reduce absenteeism but also increase teachers' effectiveness and improve student performance. In...

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has shown considerable promise, but thus far the literature has tended to focus on individual technological tools, without due regard for how the choice of one such tool over another impacts CSCL, either in outline or in detail. The present study, therefore, directly compared the learning-related uses of an online discussion forum against such use of a mobile instant-messaging app by the same group of 78 upper-division undergraduate...

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has shown considerable promise, but thus far the literature has tended to focus on individual technological tools, without due regard for how the choice of one such tool over another impacts CSCL, either in outline or in detail. The present study, therefore, directly compared the learning-related uses of an online discussion forum against such use of a mobile instant-messaging app by the same group of 78 upper-division undergraduate...

This mixed-method pilot study investigated the impact of a custom Short Message Service (SMS) reminder system developed to help students reduce procrastination and increase performance on weekly content-related quizzes in a high-enrollment hybrid online course. Text message reminders were sent to three students with high procrastination and low performance levels on a schedule based on free-operant avoidance principles, where messages would be terminated upon completion of the weekly quiz....

Donor Organizations & the Principles for Digital Development: A Landscape Assessment and Gap Analysis. (Principles for Digital Development — Resource Development Program Asset No. 1)   Also available at https://digitalprinciples.org/resource/donor-organizations-the-principles-for-digital-development-a-landscape-assessment-and-gap-analysis/, https://digitalprinciples.org/wp-content/uploads/PDD2018_interactive.pdf

Discussion lists have gained a significant popularity in professional development research over the past few decades for the opportunity they provide for asynchronous interaction. This article presents findings from a small-scale case study that aimed at exploring the nature of teachers’ asynchronous exchanges in a discussion list. The data comprised the archived log of the messages in a Yahoo Group discussion list by five in-service English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers who...

In this study, we evaluate the efficacy of teacher communication with parents and students as a means of increasing student engagement. We estimate the causal effect of teacher communication by conducting a randomized field experiment in which sixth- and ninth-grade students were assigned to receive a daily phone call home and a text/written message during a mandatory summer school program. We find that frequent teacher–family communication immediately increased student engagement as...

English in Action (EIA) is an English language teacher development project based in Bangladesh that was intended to run from 2008 to 2017, but which was extended at the request of the Government of Bangladesh, with additional funding from UKAID, for a further year to 2018. By the time of the design of this study (2014-2015) EIA was drawing to the end of upscaling (phase III, 2011-2014) and entering institutionalisation and sustainability (phase IV, 2014-17, extended 2018). Successive prior...

American Institutes for Research (AIR) is conducting an impact evaluation of The United Nations Children's Emergency Fund's (UNICEF's) teacher-training program and reinforcing text messages that aim to provide meaningful knowledge regarding the transformative potential of positive gender socialization in education for peace building in the region of Karamoja, Uganda. The impact evaluation assesses the effects of the teacher-training program, with an emphasis on gender socialization, on...

American Institutes for Research (AIR) is conducting an impact evaluation of The United Nations Children's Emergency Fund's (UNICEF's) teacher-training program and reinforcing text messages that aim to provide meaningful knowledge regarding the transformative potential of positive gender socialization in education for peace building in the region of Karamoja, Uganda. The impact evaluation assesses the effects of the teacher-training program, with an emphasis on gender socialization, on...