Investigating The Academic Performance and The Progression of Primary Students to Higher Levels in Bhutan: A Case Study of Upper Primary Classrooms in Tsirang Dzongkhag

A worrisome situation is observed year after year, that is, children in Classes IV, V, and VI, in the upper primary classrooms of Tsirang Dzongkhag, are unable to read a grade-level text at grade level and unable to write connected, grade-level English, Dzongkha, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies, but are promoted year after year with passing grades in each of these subjects. Weak comprehension and regular promotion are somehow "co-produced" by the "ordinary machinery" of the classroom: the way lessons are taught, the language used to teach them, and the way that school-based assessment is designed, marked, and used to authorize progression. This study examines how that paradox is created within the day-to-day life of the Tsirang classroom, a linguistically unique southern dzongkhag where the local home language is Lhotshamkha and the school language is Dzongkha. The medium of instruction and assessment is English. Research in Bhutan has focused on policy intent and system-level outcomes, offering little insight into the classroom-level mechanisms – pedagogy, language of instruction, and ongoing assessment – which enable under-prepared learners to continue to make progress. This study follows a qualitative case study design (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Yin, 2018), which restricts the study to the case of Tsirang and embeds the three purposively sampled government schools (urban/semi-urban, rural, and remote) as units of the case. Four methods of data generation are triangulated: non-participant classroom observation across five core subjects and three grades; and focus group discussions with teachers, students (boys and girls), and parents. Braun and Clarke's (2022) reflexive thematic analysis will be used to analyze the data. The study is expected to reveal the classroom, language, and assessment practices that facilitate the learning of under-prepared students and to suggest locally applicable recommendations as a solution to a globally contextualized problem, in accordance with SDG 4.