Poster

[1Z114] Socioeconomic Disparities in Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) Skills Acquisition in Bangladesh: Role of Parental Involvement and Study Material Provision to Close the Skill Gap

*Rakibul HASSAN¹ (1. Kobe University)

Keywords:Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN), FLN skills gap , Study material provision, Parental involvement, Socioeconomic disparity

Low household socioeconomic status (SES) is often associated with poor academic achievement of the children. While previous studies almost equivocally showed the SES achievement gap, the factors or activities that help close the achievement gap have been subjective and contextual. Parental involvement (demand side activity) and provision of school material to children (supply side activity) has been shown as effective activities to close the gap by some studies, while some other evidence has shown no significant effect. In addition to showing inconsistent effect of those activities, none of the previous studies have examined the effect of both supply and demand side activities to close the FLN skill gap. Therefore, this study examines the disparities in the FLN skills acquisition among different socioeconomic status (SES) groups and explore how parent’s discussion of school budget in the school meeting and provision of study materials to children close the skill gap. This study uses Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) 2019 Bangladesh dataset which is the most recent, country representative and publicly available data. The merged dataset of children aged 5-17 and household information were used in this study, with the sample size of 9,985 which is obtained after data cleaning. Since the dependent variable of this study is binary in nature, this study applied Binary Logistic Regression Model to test the hypotheses. The findings of the study suggest that there is a huge disparity among students from different household wealth groups. Students from richer households have higher odds of having foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) skills compared to the poorer households. However, when children received material support from the school (supply side activity) and parents discussed the use of school budget or fund received by child’s school (demand side activity), the FLN skills gap closes as those two activities are more beneficial for the poorest households compared to their richer counterparts.