Mothers, Mobiles and Measurement of Young Children’s Learning

Pratham’s early childhood education intervention focuses on the holistic development of children aged 3 to 6 years, using local resources, age-appropriate materials and the involvement of parents and caregivers. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our model for early years involved a direct play-based intervention with children in government preschool centres, primarily Anganwadis, and engaging with mothers through community-based groups and events. With the closure of Anganwadis post-March-2020, it was critical to empower mothers to play an active role in their children’s learning, since they strongly influence children’s development during their early years. Thus, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Pratham transitioned to a home and community-centric remote learning model, with mothers at the centre of young children’s learning and development.

On a daily basis, Pratham team members sent mothers simple game and play-based activities to conduct with their children, through SMS text messages or WhatsApp videos/ audio clips. They also regularly called mothers to provide support, clarify doubts, listen to experiences, and receive feedback. Through this remote learning model, Pratham reached ~90,000 children from ages 3 to 6 across 14 states in India.

To understand our young children’s situation during this period, we conducted in-person assessment activities with over 4,500 children in January 2021, when movement in the community was possible. The activity-based assessment was designed to understand children’s learning outcomes in the domains of social-emotional development, language development as well as cognitive and pre-math development. While the assessment included several different activities, a further analysis revealed significant correlations between the characteristics of mothers and children’s learning improvements in letter and number recognition.

Our key findings include:

• Higher mother-child engagement with remote activities was positively linked to learning improvements: We quantified the engagement with activities sent via phones through a proxy indicator – this was the proportion of delivered activities that were completed during a reference period of 7 days (based on what mothers reported). We observed that when more than 50% of the activities were completed, the children ‘s learning was more likely to improve. This showed us that sharing appropriate activity-based content with mothers and sustaining high engagement had a positive link to learning outcomes. This engagement was driven by consistent feedback calls and strong relationships that Pratham team members developed with mothers in the community.

 

• The mother’s access to any type of phone, be it a regular low-tech keypad phone or a smartphone, was positively correlated with learning improvements: The mother’s phone ownership can be seen as a proxy for household socio-economic conditions. Of those sampled, 85% of mothers owned phones, with 48% owning regular keypad phones (with no internet connection), and 37% owning smartphones. However, 15% did not own phones at all, and these mothers were likely to be from the poorest households. For young mothers, having access to a smartphone may also reflect her own position in the family. Nonetheless, our findings indicated that even a low-tech resource like a regular keypad phone could make a significant difference in children’s learning progress over time. It can be argued that video clips sent via smartphones are better learning resources than text messages sent to a regular keypad phone. However, our findings suggest that both types of phones enabled mothers to further their children’s learning outcomes.

Learning from the experiences and evidence generated, Pratham modified and adapted mother engagement efforts in the early childhood space by forming mothers’ groups in the neighborhood. These groups of 4-6 mothers met once a week to discuss activities and share experiences. Groups usually had leaders known as Smart Mothers, who played an important role in facilitating regular interactions between all members and also had access to smartphones. The group structure and culture ensured that mothers who did not have access to phones could still learn about the activities from other mothers. Members also provided the guidance, motivation and engagement to continue activities with children. Between October 2020 to March 2021, Pratham activated ~15,600 mothers’ groups covering ~72,600 mothers across 14 states in India.

Thinking ahead, we at Pratham strive to evolve effective interventions to empower mothers to support children’s foundational learning. By examining our past interventions as well as ongoing mother engagement efforts, we seek to explore the role of continuous daily follow-ups and feedback in contributing to deeper engagement and the participation of mothers. We also seek to measure the impact of mothers’ groups’ interventions in improving the mothers’ knowledge and practices, and the consequent improvements in children’s learning outcomes.

 

This blog was originally published on UKFIET – The Education and Development Forum

 

Bio: This blog was written by Varsha Hari Prasad, Senior Associate at the Measurement, Monitoring and Evaluation unit at Pratham Education Foundation, India.