ADB AI Needs Assessment and Training for Primary Education Teachers in Bangladesh

Under the Asian Development Bank's Supporting Fourth Primary Education Development Program (PEDP4), a team of researchers — including academics from the University of Oxford's Department of Education — ran Bangladesh's first small-scale artificial-intelligence needs assessment and training exercise for primary-school teachers. Between August 2023 and January 2024, the team surveyed primary teachers on which pedagogies could benefit from AI-enabled automation and on their own perceptions of integrating AI and automation into their teaching tasks, then delivered a hands-on training workshop.

After data cleaning, the study retained 1,253 valid teacher responses (1,224 collected online, 29 in person) — a sample size that let the team identify concrete gaps in AI awareness and specific tasks (such as grading and lesson-resource preparation) that teachers themselves saw as most suited to AI assistance. The findings were published in December 2024 as ADB Sustainable Development Working Paper Series No. 101 (DOI 10.22617/WPS240575-2), with an accompanying deposit in the University of Oxford's research archive.

As a first, small-scale exercise, the study is explicit that its findings are exploratory rather than a basis for immediate national rollout: it maps teacher readiness and perceptions rather than demonstrating measured gains in pupil learning, and its online-heavy sample likely over-represents better-connected teachers. It nonetheless provides one of the only empirically grounded, peer-reviewed baselines for AI-in-teaching readiness in South Asian primary education.

Read the full analysis: https://www.adb.org/publications/artificial-intelligence-education-bangladesh

Read the full analysis: https://www.adb.org/publications/artificial-intelligence-education-bangladesh