The education ministry selected its first batch of 36 action research proposals under the Sherig Endowment Fund.
The Fund was launched last year to enhance the quality of teaching and learning through promotion of research among schools.
Changangkha Middle Secondary School (CMSS) in Thimphu is one of the recipients of the Sherig Endowment Fund.
The school will devote its attention on finding out reasons and strategies for the poor performance of students in mathematics.
“In our school we have a very good practice of carrying out result analysis after the term test, midterm examination and the annual examination. So we came across these result analysis that the performance of students in mathematic have been persistently very poor and this raised a concern in us as to what could be the factors contributing to it and hence the reason for the study,” said a teacher with CMSS, Sabina Kafley.
Likewise, the Education ministry received 38 proposals from schools across the country. It ranged from strategies to help students remember dates in history to make reading a habit for lifelong learning.
Action research is a small scale reflective process through which schools will be able to look on issues that they are facing and come up with interventions. It is also to create a strong research among teachers to bring about positive improvement in their teaching skills and improve the school system as a whole.
“Once the schools complete their action research, they are required to present to the school management and the schools will implement the recommendations from the research and also we are planning to create an online platform where the schools will be encouraged to publish their action research online so that it could be used as a basis for policy formulation or planning process especially related to education,” said the Senior Planning Officer of the education ministry, Rinchen Samdrup.
Some 100 proposals will be supported under the fund, this year. The qualifying proposals will get a maximum grant of Nu 20,000. For the first batch of selected schools, they will submit the final report of their research, this September.
