STUDY HABITS AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERSTICS LEARNERS’ ATTRIBUTES AND PERCEPTIONS OF EFFECTIVENESS OF GENDER-SENSITIVE AND RESPONSIVE TEXTS AND TUTORIALS OF OPEN SCHOOL OF BANGLADESH OPEN UNIVERSITY

Year 2015, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 1 - 7, 02.11.2015

Sabina Yeasmın Chandu Murthy C. R. K. Murthy

Abstract

Open School (OS) of the Bangladesh Open University (BOU) has passed more than an era in imparting school education at par to the formal education using mainly self-learning materials (SLMs) and face-to-face (f2f) tutorial sessions at the weakened near to the learners’ place. Both male and female have been the learners of the OS programs named Secondary School Certificate (SSC) for grade-9-10 and Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) for grade 11-12. There have always been questions; do tutors provide a gender-sensitive learning environment -are girls encouraged to answer questions, do the texts present stereotypical images of girls? This paper aims to study on this issue. Selected stakeholders including learners are interviewed as per the objectives of the study. Subject group of this study is learners and tutors and the control group is non-user of OS SLMs. The questionnaires and interviews are taken place based on the various variables inherited in the research questions, and also be matched with the policy and status analysis so as to formulate the framework of gender sensitive and responsive OS programs. In order to study the attributes and perceptions of the learners on the effectiveness of gender sensitive and responsive texts, a questionnaire is developed. A five-point Likert scale of 1 to 5, ranging from ‘strongly agree’ and ‘strongly disagree’ as anchoring points are used for main items.

Keywords

SLM, f2f, tutor, learner, gender, learning, stereotype etc

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