Resources for Children
Pakistan
ExECEP
Exploring Early Childhood Education in Pakistan
Researchers have primarily studied how young kids learn in Western countries like the US and UK. They use that information to decide how to teach children in other countries because there is very less research in these countries, especially Pakistan. That is why we're doing research in Pakistani katchi classes, preschools and nurseries to understand what makes learning better for Pakistani children. We're looking at things like how teachers teach and how kids develop skills like language, numbers, problem-solving, etc. By understanding this, we can find ways to make education in Pakistan even better for young people.
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Our study included over 600 children and 70 teachers from 28 private and 24 public schools in Karachi to take part in the research study. Our 52 schools were from all 7 districts of Karachi. We assessed children on their learning in September and then again in May. We also conducted classroom observations in January to understand children's learning environment. Findings from this study will be used to inform future research and build programmes to support Pakistani children and teachers.
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For this project, we offered paid fieldwork opportunities to 10 individuals. We worked with Pakistani research experts and teachers to ensure that our project was culturally appropriate. We also partnered with multiple other non-profit organisations who supported the project through various ways.
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Questions regarding the project should be sent to Anushay, at anushay.mazhar@education.ox.ac.uk
August & September
2023
Working with schools and experts to finalise our study protocol. Piloting the protocol in a few schools. Recruiting research interns. Submitting research protocol to University of Oxford. Training research interns.
October 2023
Continue in-person training of research interns. Obtaining consent from parents and teachers of participating schools.
November
2023
First wave of data collection. Working with over 500 children from 42 schools in Karachi (6 from each district, 3 private and 3 public)
January & February
2024
Second wave of data collection. Conducting full-day observations of the participating classrooms.
April 2024
Third and final wave of data collection. Working with the same children as in November, conducting the same tasks.
June 2024 onwards
Data cleaning, data analysis, and write up.
30
May Update
We are delighted to share that our third wave of data collection has also been completed. We are grateful to our schools who stuck by us throughout the project. We now look forward to analysing the data.
May
10
Data Collection
Our first and second rounds of data collection have been completed, with the support of our ExECEP Team. We have worked with over 50 schools from Karachi, around 70 teachers and over 650 children!
February
06
SRCD Funding
RfC's founder and ExECEP's lead researcher, Anushay Mazhar, was awarded the Society for Research in Child Development's (SRCD) Patrice Engle Dissertation Grant to facilitate the research study.
September