Balsakhi Remedial Education Program
RCTJournal Article
In urban primary schools in developing countries, rapid enrollment expansion without level-targeted instruction leaves millions of children unable to acquire basic reading and arithmetic skills.
Picture this
Hiring local secondary-school educated young women to pull lagging students out of standard classes for two hours daily to focus strictly on foundational competencies operates like a dedicated athletic assistant who works separately with struggling team members to master basic footwork before returning to regular practice.
What the evidence says
Remedial education increased average test scores in treatment schools by 0.14 standard deviations in year 1 and 0.28 standard deviations in year 2, with targeted bottom-third children gaining 0.40 standard deviations and directly assigned children gaining 0.60 standard deviations.
- Who was studied
- N = 12,855 students in Year 1 and N = 21,936 students in Year 2 across primary government schools in Vadodara and Mumbai, India.
- How
- Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) assigning schools to treatment and comparison groups, utilizing instrumental variables to estimate direct treatment effects on assigned children.
What to do
Employ secondary-school educated community members to provide two hours of daily targeted foundational literacy and numeracy tutoring to low-performing primary students outside the main classroom.
From the source
"A remedial education program hired young women to teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills. It increased average test scores of all children in treatment schools by 0.28 standard deviation, mostly due to large gains experienced by children at the bottom of the test-score distribution."
Remedying Education: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India