Data Driven Culture

Data is critical to informing sustainable decisions that transform India’s education ecosystem and positively impact the futures of millions of young learners. However, credible data is amiss in public education. To address the data gap, we build feedback mechanisms that collect critical data that informs curriculum development and teacher capacity building across the states we work in. 

The government education system often runs on assumptions about teacher motivation, school conditions, and why things succeed or fail. Data brings clarity and nuance to decisions that, in turn, affect thousands of classrooms. 

Our Approach

We collect data at multiple points across implementation cycles, process insights, and share them with relevant government stakeholders to close the loop.

1. Teacher training data: Support strategies are created leveraging data generated at teacher trainings, pointing out, in real-time, what worked and by identifying teachers who require support.
2. Curriculum implementation data: Progress on curriculum implementation at the school level is captured to understand completion rates of modules and identify the concepts that teachers are finding difficult to facilitate. This is particularly relevant given that many teachers are themselves first-generation learners of future skills.
3. Student evidence of learning: Projects from ideathons and hackathons provide a rich source of data on what students have learned, how they are applying concepts to their lives, and what problems feel meaningful to them.
4. Evaluation data: Data at the learner, educator, and system level help track learning outcomes, teacher adoption rates, and the effectiveness of different strategies. It also gives educators, master trainers, and district officials concrete reflection points for determining future priorities.
5. Infrastructure data: Given the focus on computational thinking and AI literacy in schools, the availability of labs and smart classes is critical for learners. We work actively to keep this data up to date and work with state and district departments to refurbish, upgrade, and set up new facilities where required. 

Impact

The use of data for reflection has opened up new opportunities in our work with the government to make learning experiences for young people more contextual and effective. 

In Gujarat, data from teacher training and student projects have led state officials to contextualise the curriculum integrating cultural realities and learner experiences. Past student projects have also been included in  teacher training modules on ideathons and hackathons. 

In Odisha, monitoring data indicated that educators were feeling burdened while implementing the Kaushali Curriculum, an IT and coding curriculum for higher-secondary school learners in government schools. This led to a syllabus revision. By simplifying and revisiting the syllabus across grades, the Curriculum was made more effective and ensured that both educators and learners benefited. 

We are also working with the state’s education department to develop a dashboard that maps curriculum implementation across the state, generating insights at the district, block, and school level to inform more targeted support strategies.