Ek Tara - Transforming vulnerable communities through quality education and skill development
The below study showcases a summary of the project, to read through the full process please CLICK HERE.
The following project was done in collaboration with the London Business School for EK-TARA, an NGO located in Kolkata, India, as a part of a module on Behavioural Economics for Social Impact.
Service Design | Visual Design | User Research | Behavioural Science for Social Impact
Team: Komal Pahwa, Venkat Rao, Yen-yi Chiang, Shravani Shinde, Jiangyue Wu
Project Supervisors: Prof. David Faro and Prof. Jean-Pierre Benoît
Ek-Tara Advisor: Shuvasree Biswas
Partners: Royal College of Art (RCA) | London Business School (LBS) | Ek-TARA foundation
Overview
Ek Tara is a registered charitable trust committed to improving the quality of life for girls and women in urban slum communities near Kolkata.
EK-Tara Mission
Facilitating holistic education for girls
Change in mindsets to elevate the position of girls
Create community leaders
Focus on collaborative networks to scale impact
Challenges & Hypothesis
Ek Tara is currently struggling with the following challenges -
- Analysing and improving on internal processes to ensure teacher retention and growth
- Need of parameters to look into to ensure effective process-oriented deliverables from teachers
- Analysing non-academic data to maximise the potential of students
- Leveraging technology to integrate student learning with staff deliverables to track student growth
We narrowed down our scope to focus on one problem to help deliver a higher impact and we chose to focus on the following:
- Analysing and improving on processes to ensure hiring the right teachers thereby enabling better retention and growth
Our Hypothesis
If we can understand and solve the behavioural barriers that might be leading to lower retention of deserving applicants then we might be able to recruit teachers for more years who are committed towards the mission of Ek-Tara, resulting in overall improvement in teaching processes as well as maximising effective management within the system.
Research Methodology
We followed our double diamond approach and started with desk research by deep-diving into research papers around retention and growth, and how it is done by corporates and NGOs to understand how can we approach it.
Following that we conducted deep extensive interviews with stakeholders within the system, Interviewing both seasoned and new teachers at Ek-Tara provided us with valuable insights into the organisation's dynamics and the perspectives of the teachers at different stages of their teaching careers.
We created personas and mapped their journeys further using the interview insights which helped us to understand the problem in depth.
Interview findings
We organised three rounds of primary research to gather insights into the challenges of Ek-Tara. The last round of research included in-depth interviews with two teachers from Ek-Tara.
High Turnover Rate Among Young Teachers:
- Over 60% of Ektara's teachers are young, and many of them pursue further education while working. However, a common trend observed is that many young teachers leave their positions within six months.- Teachers often leave due to challenges in commuting, minimal holidays, and long working hours.
Many teachers who apply for teaching jobs at Ek-Tara do not hold a Bachelor's in Education degree and often transition to mainstream school jobs after gaining experience.Many teachers who apply for teaching jobs at Ek-Tara do not hold a Bachelor's in Education degree and often transition to mainstream school jobs after gaining experience.
Problem statement
How might we help Ek-Tara recruit new teachers who can be retained for a few years while staying committed to the organisation?
Behavioural Analysis
We tried and tested various behavioural concepts and theories, some of which are-
Present bias
Present bias is the tendency to settle for a smaller present reward rather than wait for a larger future reward, in a trade-off situation.
Framing
The framing effect is when our decisions are influenced by the way information is presented. Equivalent information can be more or less attractive depending on what features are highlighted.
Social Norms
A social norm exists when individuals practise a behaviour because they believe that others like them or in their community practise the behaviour.
Halo Effect
The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about their character. Essentially, your overall impression of a person ("He is nice!") impacts your evaluations of that person's specific traits ("He is also smart!").
Action Bias
Inaction may be due to several factors, including inertia or anticipated regret. However, sometimes people have an impulse to act to gain a sense of control over a situation and eliminate a problem. This has been termed the action bias.
Anchoring bias
Anchoring is a particular form of priming effect whereby initial exposure to a number serves as a reference point and influences subsequent judgments. The process usually occurs without our awareness.
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a systematic (non-random) error in thinking, in the sense that a judgment deviates from what would be considered desirable from the perspective of accepted norms or correct in terms of formal logic. The application of heuristics is often associated with cognitive biases.
My role in the project
I was actively involved throughout the research on a team of 5 and took the lead on the quantitative tests conducted through Mturk and Qualtrics. I also created the poster visuals to be used in the tests conducted. We collectively worked on analysing and understanding the data received through these tests by carefully curating data through the use of software like Excel and experimenting with the right prompts in AI models to create visual charts that helped us record which posters received positive responses among different genders and which ones received average responses.
Project challenges & Key Highlights
While I have read books by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, applying them to real-world scenarios myself and testing them through conducting randomised controlled experiments (RCT) was insightful yet challenging at the same time especially trying to analyse which variables need to be varied and which need to stay consistent to generate the right results. Considering the vast application of behavioural economics, trying to keep track of and pinpoint biases was initially a bit of a task to grasp and apply.
Decision-making process of our personas
To better understand the decision-making process regarding applying for a teaching position at Ek Tara, we can analyse her thought flow, which can be divided into 5 phases: self-assessment, job search, job evaluation, document preparation, and job application.
By analysing these phases, we can identify three potential opportunities for behavioural intervention in the initial three stages:
After identifying intervention opportunities, we drew inspiration from relevant behavioural theories to design posters that would attract applications for Ek Tara teaching positions. We then narrowed these down to four variations.
Behavioural Tests
To test our behavioural Nudges we designed a Randomised Control Trial using Qualtrics and Mturk. During our experiment, we received 484 responses.
Test Question:
Scenario: Imagine you don't have a Bachelor's degree in Education but want to pursue a career in teaching.
Survey:
In the Survey, any one of the 5 posters from A-E was randomly assigned to a user. The survey requested them to rate how likely or unlikely they were to apply for this job after seeing the poster. The scale was 1-5, where 1 being DEFINITELY NOT and 5 being DEFINITELY YES.
Control Group:
Poster-A was our Control group and it was used as a benchmark to compare the performance of other Posters that were designed with specific behavioural concepts in mind. It must be noted that the content in Poster-A was adopted from the existing job post that EK-TARA uses to hire teachers.
Data Analysis
From the 484 responses, only 273 responses were taken forward for analysis based on the Age group 18-34. The selection was done as this age set was best suited for the teachers to work for EK-TARA as found in our research.
Our Proposed Solution
Based on our randomised controlled test deductions, we applied certain concepts to the poster that would help reach out to the right audience for the job postings and help Ek-Tara with retention.
Measuring the Potential Impact
These are some metrics we believe can be used to measure the impact of our proposed solution in terms of retention of teachers at Ek-Tara:
- Application Rate
- Shortlisted Candidates
- Reduction in Drop-out Rate
- Improvement in Employment Tenure
- Overall Motivation and connection with students
Our poster has been taken up by Ek-Tara and will be used by them going forward in job postings.
Learnings and Reflections
We collaborated for London Business School and EK-TARA, as a part of a module on Behavioural Economics for Social Impact. Being a part of sessions taught by Professor David Faro and Professor Jean-Pierre Benoît at LBS was an invaluable opportunity and I feel immensely fortunate to have been a part of it.
We as a team worked together on understanding, applying and testing behavioural concepts and nudging theories and how can these be applied to deliver a positive impact in social scenarios. I am proud of our team as we were able to do a thorough analysis through our double-diamond process and integrate and test daily biases and behavioural barriers as a part of it. It helped us learn a lot about behavioural barriers how it impacts our decision-making in our daily lives and how and where can these behavioural nudges help in informing policy decisions.
I wish to take forward this approach to inform my research to balance it from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives, while also keeping in mind to be critical of the biases that creep in, in our decision-making, especially when designing solutions or services with a user-centric approach.
I extend my heartfelt gratitude to Shuvasree Biswas from Ek-Tara, along with the staff for their support and for giving us their valuable time throughout the project. I feel grateful to Shuvasree Biswas for always being there even with the time difference. It was a privilege to work with Ek-Tara to try to tackle real-world challenges and craft meaningful solutions in the process. I feel honoured to have partnered with such remarkable organisations like Ek-Tara & London Business School.
