Original source
Remedying Education: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India (2007)
Published research article · The Quarterly Journal of Economics, pp. 1235–1264
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© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Active Tracking Attrition Mitigation
"To minimize attrition, the testing team returned to the schools multiple times, and children who still failed to appear were tracked down at home and, if found, were administered the same test."
Balsakhi Remedial Education Program
"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."
Class Size Reduction Ineffectiveness
"In contrast, there is no discernible impact on their classroom peers, who were 'treated' with smaller class sizes and a more homogenous classroom, consistent with the previous literature suggesting that inputs alone are ineffective."
Computer-Assisted Learning Program
"A computer-assisted learning program focusing on math increased math scores by 0.47 standard deviation."
Cumulative Multi-Year Learning Gains
"In Mumbai, the effect of two years of treatment (from year 1 pretest score to year 2 posttest score) is substantially larger than that in either individual year (0.60 standard deviations in math, for example, versus 0.40 for year 2 in grade 4)."
Curriculum-Instruction Mismatch
"Neither the pedagogy nor the curriculum has been adapted to take into account the influx of children and their characteristics: many of these children are first generation learners whose parents are not in a position to follow what is happening in school or to react if their child falls behind."
Discontinuity Assignment Identification
"Banerjee et al. describe and implement a second strategy for separating direct and indirect effects, which exploits the discontinuity in the assignment: students ranked in the bottom twenty of their class are much more likely to be assigned to a balsakhi than those ranked above the bottom twenty."
Treatment Effect Decay
"One year after the programs were over, initial gains remained significant for targeted children, but they faded to about 0.10 standard deviation."
Hawthorne Transitory Performance Decay
"One possible interpretation is that the increase of 0.10 standard deviations corresponds to the 'real' impact of the program and that the remainder of the difference was due a transitory increase due to short-term improvement in knowledge... or a Hawthorne effect."
Intention-to-Treat (ITT) Instrumentation
"Throughout the paper, the schools that were assigned balsakhis but did not get them are included in the 'intention to treat' group. The regression analysis then adjusts the estimates for the fraction of the treatment group that was effectively treated by using the initial assignment as an instrument for treatment."
Inter-Program Additive Independence
"The programs appear to have no interaction with each other: the coefficients on the interaction on the math and overall test score are negative and insignificant."
Non-Reallocation Resource Isolation
"Teachers were assigned to classes before the program was implemented, and we observed no instance of subsequent reassignment to a different standard. There are essentially no other resources to speak of that the head teacher could allocate to the grade that did not receive the balsakhi."
Paraprofessional Remediation Cost-Effectiveness
"Overall, the Balsakhi Program cost is approximately Rs. 107 ($2.25) per student per year, while the CAL Programs cost approximately Rs 722 ($15.18) per student per year, including the cost of computers and assuming a five-year depreciation cycle."
School Participation-Learning Decoupling
"And indeed, the recent evidence suggests that many interventions, which increase school participation, do not improve test scores for the average student."
Standardized Pedagogy Scalability
"There is rapid turnover among the balsakhis (each stays for an average of one year, typically until they get married or get another job), indicating that the success of the program does not depend on a handful of very determined and enthusiastic individuals."
Teacher-Student Social Distance
"Ramachandran et al. argue that social attitudes and community prejudices may limit teachers' effectiveness and that teachers feel as if 'they were doing a big favor by teaching children from erstwhile "untouchable" communities or very poor migrants.'"
Unadapted Resource Input Ineffectiveness
"Worse still, a number of rigorous, randomized evaluations have confirmed that spending more on resources like textbooks [Glewwe, Kremer, and Moulin 2002], flip charts [Glewwe et al. 2004], or additional teachers [Banerjee, Jacob, and Kremer 2004] has no impact on children's test scores"