Phone tutoring boosts math scores when schools are forced to close

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1:33Welcome back to The Nature Podcast. This week, how phone calls could improve math skills during school closures, and why the world map might be in for an update. I'm Benjamin Thompson.

1:56During times of emergency or disaster, children's education can suffer, especially during periods of prolonged school closure, for example. This week, a team of researchers have been looking at a potentially cost-effective way to try and mitigate the impacts to young people's education, and they've got a paper out about it in Nature. Reporting on the story is Mahana Basu, who joins me now. Mahana, thank you so much for being here. Thanks a lot for having me. So let's start by talking about the background to this work, because researchers have been looking at ways to help students with their schooling during times like this for a while.

2:33That's right. So one of the things that often happens in situations of emergency is that non-governmental groups, even district level school administrations, they try out different kinds of interventions to make sure that they're still reaching out to the children, still continuing their education. But what is missing is a coordinated effort to see what really works. And by that, I mean, is something that is being implemented in one district or one country applicable or really showing results across different settings. So that is what the researchers here have tried to do. So in this instance, they came up with an intervention and tested it in a lot of different places then to try and find evidence as to its efficacy.

3:26Tell me about the setup. What was it looking to do and how did this differ maybe from other experiments? So in this case, the setup is a randomized controlled trial, kind of similar to how you would plan or design a study for a new medicine or a new vaccine. It's often rare to find these kind of studies in the education setting because different countries have different setups and everyone tries to do something good for the children, but there's little rigor to actually collect data that can be applicable across settings. So that's what they have done here. And in this study, the idea was to reach out to the students once their schools had closed.

4:09So the study period is the time when different countries were in the middle of the COVID pandemic. All the schools were shutting down for long periods of time. So the idea was to reach these students in a simple, accessible way with the technology that was there in every kind of household, even in low resource settings. So not smartphones, not desktops or laptops or internet connections. So they went for the very basic mobile phones where you just basically can receive a call. That's all you need. And so in some instances, then teachers would reach out to students on this mobile phone while the schools were closed.

4:53Right. Yes. So what they did was they took all the students and divided that into three groups, where one group basically was the control group, they did not get any intervention. The second group received SMS messages, text messages, with very simple math problems or nudges to actually finish this math problem that they got. And then there was a third group that would receive SMS as well as a phone call from their tutor. and in that phone call the tutor will assess the student's ability to solve basic math problems and see whether they are actually ready to move on to the next level whether they understood what had been taught and for each student that journey would be different so over a series of these phone calls, the teacher got a chance to understand where the student was at and then tailor the tutoring in a way that was beneficial for each student.

5:58Okay, and this was tested in a randomized control trial, as you say, in different countries. So the trials were conducted in India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda between 2020 to 2022. And most of the children were in grades three to five, except in Kenya, the trial included children in grades one and two. So more or less, these are all primary level children who are learning the very basics of mathematical skills. So young children then, what did the results of this trial across these countries show then? So this is actually what has got the researchers excited. The results show that But with phone calls, the improvement in the students was actually almost three times of what you would expect from different kinds of educational interventions, from like past literature, from reviews about different interventions.

6:59And in Uganda and the Philippines, especially, there was a huge improvement in the abilities of the students. in Uganda, when they finished this intervention, they actually found that some of the grade four students had abilities similar to what was expected from grade five students. So the researchers here are saying that not only are the students able to maintain their level of education, maintain their skills, they're also actually improving over what would be status quo. So that's the very sort of hands-on arm of the intervention. Presumably, the sort of middle tier where the kids just got a message from a teacher or an educator didn't work quite as well.

7:42That's right. And this we have seen in past studies as well, where students just get nudges to engage with material rather than having someone working with them. It doesn't work as well as one-on-one interaction. And that's the same thing that this study shows as well. And the group that just got nudges through SMS. They still did improve a little bit, but it wasn't as much as the one-on-one tutoring. And costs, of course, are always important with things like this. Countries who may be in need of interventions like this are potentially dealing with a wider crisis and so have competing calls for funding.

8:25How does this one stack up in terms of costs? So the researchers made an estimate and they're saying that the intervention costs about 11 US dollars per child for the one-on-one tutoring. And that sort of means that for every 100 US dollars, you would get 3.6 years of high quality schooling. And according to them, this is a very low cost intervention. Although some of the other researchers that we spoke to did say that even though the cost of implementing each call might not be very high, but training these tutors, training these researchers, or having people spend this extra time on students might increase costs when you scale up the program to national levels.

9:12Right, because teachers and educators are incredible, right, and work incredibly hard, but there are only a finite number of them, which, as you say, could be an issue in terms of enrolling more children into programs like this. Yes, so that is what a lot of the people that we spoke to are saying that, you know, when you try to scale this up to a national level, finding the funds to train these tutors, to train these teachers might become difficult. But at the same time, the researchers are saying that the burden does not necessarily have to fall all on a school teacher. So in this particular study as well, there are NGOs involved and tutors were from these NGOs.

9:54Second thing that they point out is that it's not that every teacher needs to make a weekly phone call to every student for the entirety of the school year. They can do this in batches for short periods of a few weeks. But of course, with interventions like this, there's always the caution that just because it's worked in these countries doesn't mean it will work everywhere. What have folk told you about that? So in this case, most of the countries are already low resource. They have gaps in their education models. And even within the study results, you can see that there's a huge difference between the effect in Uganda and the Philippines versus the other countries, India, Nepal and Kenya.

10:40And that is because they say that the base level of education in Uganda and Philippines was already very low. So yes, the results will differ depending on what the baseline education is in the country in question. But that's exactly where these kind of interventions come in. You would use these programs where children really need them rather than these becoming a one-shoe-fits-all sort of system. And so this paper's out now and the researchers have put forward their evidence. I'm getting a sense from what you're saying that when you've spoken to the wider research community, there's interest but with caveats.

11:21Yes. One thing that was very strong about this study is the fact that it is an RCT, a randomized control trial, which is something that researchers have appreciated because this is a quantitative study. And in educational research, oftentimes the studies that you have are qualitative and cannot be implemented or scaled up. So that's where there's been a lot of appreciation. Having said that, there is scepticism about how this will translate, what this would mean for teachers who already face very heavy workloads. And especially during COVID, we saw that there were reports from many countries where teachers were feeling the brunt or they were burnt out, they already were trying to adapt in a crisis situation.

12:09So yes, there is scepticism and we will need to see how these models perform or how these programs perform in a larger scale. And there already are efforts from some of these countries to study this intervention at a larger scale. And hopefully those results will tell us more about whether this can become something that can be implemented across different settings. Mahana Basu there. To read her article, look out for a link in the show notes. Coming up, how the world map you might be familiar with looks to be in for an update. Right now though, it's time for the research highlights, read by Nick Petridge-Howe.

12:56A record level of agreement between seven super-accurate clocks means a new way to define the second could be closer than ever. Since 1967, metrologists have defined the second using oscillations of the microwave radiation that cesium-133 atoms emit and absorb at a specific frequency. Now, a new generation of clocks promise even greater accuracy. But first, physicists must show that these optical clocks agree with each other. To do this, researchers compared clocks in natural metrology institutes in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom over two months, transmitting the clock's frequency output along a fibre optic network.

13:42They found a record level of agreement between the independent clocks, and the authors say the comparison shows ways for scientists to edge closer to the criteria needed to redefine the second. Take some time out for this paper, it's in physical review research.

14:04Feral pigs rooting around in soil could be an unexpected source of greenhouse gases. Invasive hoofed animals can affect biodiversity in many ways, such as by damaging soil and spreading weeds. Now researchers have worked to pin down the climate impacts as well. A team analysed six spots in Kakadu National Park in Northern Australia, which is home to one of the world's largest unmodified tropical rivers, but also feral pigs that can run rampant across the wetlands around it. The scientists studied the soil chemistry and greenhouse gas emissions in areas disturbed by pigs and paired undisturbed sites, but had to restrict their work to dry periods because of the dangers posed by saltwater crocodiles.

14:53Emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, were as much as an order of magnitude higher from disturbed plots than from undisturbed plots. The authors say controlling pig populations could help reduce planet warming gases as well as having other ecosystem impacts. You can snuffle out that research over in Biogeosciences.

15:25Picture a map of the world that you might see pinned on the wall of, say, a classroom or in an atlas. Maybe it has different colours for the different countries, maybe it doesn't. But you know what I'm talking about. Well, actually, it turns out that this map really isn't an accurate reflection of where the landmass actually is on Earth. And now steps are being taken to rectify that. Dhruv Shunai has been writing about this for Nature, and he joins me now. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. So before we get into why this change is happening, let's talk about how hard it is to get an accurate 2D map of the Earth, because it's a tough thing to do, right?

16:04Well, you're effectively trying to take a sphere, which is our globe, and turn it into a 2D projection. And if you imagine doing that, it's not going to work. And it would create these kind of distortions on the ends. And so various people have tried different ways of doing that. And some have different pros and different cons. And we have to talk about all of that if you want to explain how to make an accurate projection. And one of these projections, then one of these maps, certainly the one that I'm most familiar with, has its roots all the way back in the 1500s. Yeah. So this Mercator projection was created in 1569 by Gerardus Mercator.

16:39And why it's useful is because if you have a compass, your path can become a straight line on the Mercator map. And that's incredibly useful for ship navigation. How close is this map, this projection to reality then? What does it get right? What does it get wrong? I guess its pro would be that it has the ability to be used by ships. So it got really, really popular during the time of European maritime expansion, when they're all going across these different places. But it's not so helpful when it comes to showing the areas. So the further you are towards the poles, the more distortion area there is.

17:15So that basically means that things like Greenland, the UK, Russia, and the United States of America will all be distorted and look bigger than they actually are compared to something like Africa. Right. So you're saying that places like Greenland are expanded from reality, whereas Africa is condensed from reality. Yeah, exactly. So the most famous example is popularized by the political drama, The West Wing. And there's the scene in that program where they basically say, you think that Greenland and Africa are the same size based on this Makata map, right? And then they're like, yeah, of course, that's what everyone knows.

17:52And then they're like, well, actually, Greenland is 14 times smaller than Africa. and that comes because of this distortion from the Mercator projection and it's the reason why there are calls to change it now. But it is very popular. This map is used all over the place. Yeah, so it's extremely universal. All of your web-based services have this web version of the Mercator projection. So things like Google Maps and Bing Maps, etc., all of them use this Mercator projection. So it's very instilled in our nature. However, it does kind of create the situation where people think it's the only map. I think that's the main issue with it.

18:30It does introduce this kind of thinking where you think, oh, this is the world and this is how it is. But as you say, this isn't necessarily the way the world is. And this has led to calls for it to be changed. And indeed, a vote at the UN last Friday. Talk us through that. So this whole resolution was brought forward by Togo and it had the African Union backing as well. And they took it to the UN General Assembly and they voted on Friday with 164 votes to one in favor of pushing the world's government schools and digital navigation software away from the Makata map and towards this equal earth projection.

19:09And so six countries abstained the UN votes, while the US were the only country to reject the resolution outright, basically saying that the UN had more pressing issues to deal with than century old maps. And how does this equal world projection that's been put forward then, how does it differ from what we've already got? So whenever we're talking about projections, the best thing to do is talk about its strengths and weaknesses. So the equal earth projection actually properly shows the kind of areas, though it does distort some shapes. So the best example of this is New Zealand. So really, this is the four corners of the world map tend to have a lot more distortions, and it doesn't really show the angles that well.

19:49But it does provide like a good projection compared to the Mercator projection in showing its areas. And of course, maps and mapping and things like that are very key to a lot of different branches of science. You've been talking to researchers and to educators about what this change could mean? What have they told you? So the overwhelming response from all of the educators that I've spoken to is that this is a great opportunity to get people talking about the reason we do projections. So it's not that one is better than the other, it's that all of them are really useful for certain things. And we need to talk more generally about why each one is good.

20:29In terms of scientists, there is a big push towards this thing called geography information systems. So basically the IT technology that develops like GPS technology and the stuff that you end up seeing on Google Maps and things. so all of that academic research going into that field basically relies on people knowing about it and this kind of resolution is really useful in providing like encouragement to the community saying that hey you should go into this field and that's basically the message that i'm getting from people have the researchers given you any sense of whether they think there will be an uptick in the use of this equal earth projection because this wasn't a binding agreement at the un was it Yeah, so the resolution is non-binding.

21:14So no country is compelled to remove the Mercator map. And organizations such as Google are not suddenly required to redesign every map in favor of this equal Earth projection. So really, if the geography education and these kind of world maps don't move towards this equal Earth projection, we won't really see much impact beyond symbolic impact. However, there is reasons that introducing a new projection basically highlights that there are different projections, and that can be used by teachers to basically highlight that this is a field of interest. That was reporter Dhruv Shanae there. For more on that story, check out the show notes for some links.

21:58And that's all for this time. If you'd like to stay in touch with us, you can. We're on social media at naturepodcast, or you can send an email to podcast at nature.com. I'm Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening.

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