Demand and responsiveness to evidence among teachers and parents

Project overview

Evidence use is a pillar of the What Works Hub for Global Education, and it’s a core concept in this study primarily based in Bangladesh.  

Usually, research on evidence use focuses on policymakers. This project, however, seeks to fill a gap by focusing on evidence uptake by practitioners – in this case, teachers – and by parents too. Specifically, the study examines how teachers and parents respond and prioritise evidence and which types of evidence they are most responsive to. 

The What Works Hub for Global Education’s research uses a survey experiment to evaluate teachers’ demand for evidence in Bangladesh and India. This component will be followed by a randomised controlled trial to measure parents’ responsiveness to evidence in Bangladesh. 

The project will collect outcomes on beliefs as well as behaviours, such as teachers’ willingness to invest in their teaching and the degree to which parents advocate for further educational support for their children. The research will elicit detailed information on beliefs, contributing to understanding of how evidence informs and transforms decision-makers’ beliefs into action. 

The team’s representative sample is composed of 926 teachers across both countries and 4,765 parents in Bangladesh. Forteachers, a subset of 400 from 1,000 teachers in Bangladesh was chosen from schools assessed in the 2019 National Assessments of Secondary Students (NASS). In India, the team will collaborate with the Directorate of Education and STiR Education to survey 500 teachers. For parents, the team focuses on 5,000 grade 8 students from schools in Bangladesh involved in the NASS 2019.