Week 6: The Final Presentation

So, this was it...our final report and our final presentation. From my earlier post, we realized that surverys were great in trying to figure out what questions to ask on how is PV actually helping these schools raise their SSLC pass percentages.But it wasn't so great in getting the responses we were hoping for. Students were praising the videos like no other and they seem to like school...a lot. My point being that, we found out that students did not like to criticize the school or the video intervention.

Drawing from my experiences during primary and secondary school, I did realize that we were often trained to "listen to elders". We were taught that your parents, teachers, grandparents or whatever, are elder than you and you must always show respect and that they are always right.And while we were taught in school, a teacher may be giving the wrong information but we were taught to not interrupt and not "talk back", although the 'talking back' can be just correcting the teacher correctly.

We were taught to memorize the textbooks and regurgitate those information and it was drilled within our brains that "The only right answer is in the textbook.Give another answer and you are wrong." Isn't this how we prepared for SPM?We memorized a whole paragraph on the breathing mechanism of humans or how the Portugeese took over Malaysia...but do we even know why it's relevant?We are basically machines at that time.We emphasized so much on knowing the theory and being submissive to our teachers that I think our minds were narrowed by the system itself.

And I think a somewhat similar system is being practised here.Please know that I do not claim to know all about the Indian education system.I am merely trying to draw a parallel between the education system that I grew up with and what I am seeing in these students.

So,the answers were always favorable and we could not determine how these students are learning. Therefore, we did quite a bit of research and came up with a focus group approach. A focus group allows the interviewer to speak with 5-10 students on a certain topic and it is mostly driven by the answers obtained during that session. The interviewer will be with another person who will be taking notes on the session. Here, the second interviewer pays attention to the body language and certain subtle phrases that you will not normally get from a written surveys.

Basically, a focus group gives a rich set of qualitative data. And the interviewer has to be able to intepret the data objectively and be able to recognize repetitive aspects.For example a few students may say that "The moving objects help me remember better." From this, we can draw a hypothesis that animation within the videos help with students retention. To test this hypothesis, you can do statistical analysis to determine if the animations in the videos really help with retention.

We did more research and interviews with students, teaching assistants and the staff of PV to learn more about the pedagogy of PremaVidya's intervention.We found out that PV's pedagogy is actually parallel to a learning theory, Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory.

This theory states that learning happens through these four domains:Attention, Retention, Motor Reproduction and Motivation. We found out that PV's engaging audio visuals(attention),Question-Pause-Answer Method(retention), confidence in asking questions(Motivation) and Peer-to-Peer Learning(Motor Reproduction) are parallel to this theory. If the focus group is conducted using these four domains as guidelines and the answers support this theory, we can say that PV's pedagogy is sucessful as proved by this theory.

Basically,this was our argument and we have to present this argument to our advisor, our professor and the administrators of PremaVidya during our final presentation.

The four of us presenting our final report

After our presentation

Our advisor, Cathy and our supervisor Darsana

It has been an amazing journey for me this far.I have learned a lot about myself and I have grown so much from this experience.Although my interests still lie in the medical field,I have found new causes that I care about and these are the causes that I would like to fight for, as I pursue my path towards becoming a physician.

Week 4:Our Project

So.PremaVidya(PV), the organization that I am currently working with is scaling from 200 schools to almost 500 schools next year and will be impacting more than 100,000 students in the state of Karnataka. PV has been doing an amazing job by monitoring the progress level of each student until now. They intend to to retain the quality while scaling, a dilemma any organization will face.


So, we were given a set of different goals by PV which included three big questions:

How do we scale while maintaining quality?


How is PV going to show that they are actually creating an impact?


How is PV going to monitor rural schools and rural students?


These are really ambitious goals. With the help of Professor Moledina, we refined our question and decided to stick with one question. Basically the question was "What kind of data do we use to show that PV is creating an impact?"


We know that the SSLC pass percentage is increasing when PV intervened in schools. What we don't know is how or why the SSLC pass percentages are increasing. There could be a number of factors affecting this, and we intend to show that PV is actually contributing to the rise in SSLC pass percentages.However, we are lacking time and we realize this. 


So how do we get the data that we need? We thought that surveys would be a good starting point. Our professors handed out surveys at the end of each semester to analyze the quality of their teaching and their teaching materials. We emailed different education professors in the US to get their opinion as we crafted the questions for the survey. We also emailed high school principals to  find out how they have been assessing  the quality of education in their schools. Using these, we crafted questions for the surveys. We got the surveys translated to Kannada to be distributed to two PV schools.


We visited the schools and were well received by the students. They were excited to see us(more excited to see Kristen since I look just like every other kid in the class) and were more interested in getting to know us than answering the surveys. Once we collected the completed surveys, we had to wait 3 days for them to be translated. We analyzed the surveys only to find that the answers were not what we were hoping for. We were hoping to find the learning processes the students are using while learning with the video. We were also to find other factors that might influence the child's ability to learn in class(lack of motivation to go to school).


With these, we realized that we had to conduct more research to improve our method of gathering data. I'll talk more about our progress in the next few posts.