Remedying school education in India

Can the quality of education in India's urban slums be improved? Results from two randomised field experiments conducted in Mumbai and Vadodara suggest that relatively simple interventions can make a big difference, while smaller class sizes alone may not.

New research published as NBER Working Paper No. 11904, Remedying Education: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India, by Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, Esther Duflo and Leigh Linden, is encouraging:

A remedial education program hired young women from the community to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills to children lagging behind in government schools. We find the program to be very effective: it increased average test scores of all children in treatment schools by 0.14 standard deviations in the first year, and 0.28 in the second year, relative to comparison schools. A computer-assisted learning program provided each child in the fourth grade with two hours of shared computer time per week, in which students played educational games that reinforced mathematics skills. The program was also very effective, increasing math scores by 0.35 standard deviations the first year, and 0.47 the second year.

These results were not limited to the period in which students received assistance, but persisted for at least one year after leaving the program. Two instrumental variable strategies suggest that while remedial education benefited the children who attended the remedial classes, their classmates, who did not attend the remedial courses but did experience smaller classes, did not post gains, confirming that resources alone may not be sufficient to improve outcomes.

A free November 2005 version of the paper is available here (PDF).

Comments

[AJE]

RE Indian education - don't neglect the private, unaided sector. Scroll down this post and check out the reports:
http://thefilter.blogs.com/thefilter/2005/12/eg_west_centre.html

[lorence]

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