BENGALURU: The department of school education and literacy will collaborate with global NGO J-PAL, which is likely to roll out its celebrated phone tutoring programme for maths in the state.
J-PAL, as Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab is known, seeks to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. J-PAL’s endeavours have been widely applauded, with its co-founders Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and research affiliate Michael Kremer being presented the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019.
Chief minister Siddaramaiah had announced in his latest budget that under the ‘Ganitha Ganaka’ programme, the govt would rope in J-PAL for teaching maths to class 3-5 students.
The remote numeracy intervention uses simple phone calls and one-way SMS to reach households. “J-PAL can rope in govt teachers or volunteers willing to work with children. There are several volunteers like IT employees who are willing to work with children,” said an official from the department of school education and literacy.
However, J-PAL didn’t respond to queries. As per their website, the phone calls in combination with text messages improved learning by 0.33 standard deviations. The programme has been launched in five other countries: Botswana, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, and Uganda. In India, Telangana has used the programme. The department of school education and literacy said it’d soon have meetings with the NGO to discuss the modalities of the tie-up.
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