At the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) 2026 conference, Faria Rahman, Research Associate at the Institute of Informatics and Development (IID), presented the paper Bridging Learning Gaps for Equity and Social Cohesion: Insights from ICAN ICAR in Bangladesh, co-authored with Kazi Ferdous Pavel, Senior Joint Director at IID.
The paper draws on findings from ICAN ICAR, a household-based, citizen-led assessment of children aged 5 to 16 across all 8 divisions, 64 districts, 275 villages, and around 5,500 households in Bangladesh. Aligned with the Global Proficiency Framework, the assessment generates nationally representative evidence on foundational literacy and numeracy while also capturing children who remain outside the formal school system.
The presentation highlighted several important patterns in learning inequality. Urban children were more likely than rural children to reach minimum proficiency, with the gap wider in language than in mathematics. The findings also showed strong associations between learning outcomes and home learning support. Children with access to books beyond textbooks performed substantially better than those without: 62.4% versus 44.5% in mathematics, 48.6% versus 32.0% in language, and 45.1% versus 28.3% in both domains combined. Paid tuition emerged as another major factor. Overall, 55.1% of children in the sample were receiving paid tuition, and these children were far more likely to meet minimum proficiency thresholds than those without such support.
A closer look at Grade 5 learning suggested that many children are relatively stronger in basic decoding and arithmetic, but much weaker when tasks require deeper comprehension, reasoning, and applied problem-solving. The study also found that while textbook access is nearly universal, supplementary reading access remains extremely limited: 98.5% of enrolled children reported having textbooks for their current grade, but only 6.8% had brought home additional reading materials in the previous two weeks.
The presentation argued that foundational learning gaps should be understood not only as an education issue, but also as an equity and social cohesion issue. It called for a stronger policy focus on learning quality, reading comprehension, early intervention, free school-based academic support, and more inclusive support for children who are falling behind.
The paper was presented on 1 April 2026 in the session Building Learning Capacity for Equity and Peace: School Development, Learner Agency, and Policy Responses in a Changing World, chaired by Yuta Yoneda of the University of Tsukuba, alongside presentations by academics and researchers from the University of Genoa, Zhejiang University, and Capital Normal University.