TY - JOUR
T1 - Disrupting education? Experimental evidence on technology-aided instruction in India
AU - Muralidharan, Karthik
AU - Singh, Abhijeet
AU - Ganimian, Alejandro J.
N1 - Funding Information:
* Muralidharan: Department of Economics, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla CA, NBER, and J-PAL (email: kamurali@ucsd.edu); Singh: Department of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics, Sveavagen 65, Stockholm, Sweden (email: abhijeet.singh@hhs.se); Ganimian: NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, 246 Greene Street, New York, NY (email: alejandro. ganimian@nyu.edu). This paper was accepted to the AER under the guidance of Esther Duflo, Coeditor. We thank Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, James Berry, Peter Bergman, Prashant Bharadwaj, Gordon Dahl, Roger Gordon, Heather Hill, Priya Mukherjee, Chris Walters, and several seminar participants for comments. We thank the staff at Educational Initiatives (EI), especially, Pranav Kothari, Smita Bardhan, Anurima Chatterjee, and Prasid Sreeprakash, for their support of the evaluation. We also thank Maya Escueta, Smit Gade, Riddhima Mishra, and Rama Murthy Sripada for excellent research assistance and field support. Finally, we thank J-PAL’s Post-Primary Education initiative for funding this study. The study was registered with the AEA Trial Registry (RCT ID AEARCTR-0000980). The operation of Mindspark centers by EI was funded by the Central Square Foundation, Tech Mahindra Foundation, and Porticus. All views expressed are those of the authors and not of any of the institutions with which they are affiliated.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Economic Association. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2019/4
Y1 - 2019/4
N2 - We study the impact of a personalized technology-aided after-school instruction program in middle-school grades in urban India using a lottery that provided winners with free access to the program. Lottery winners scored 0.37 σ higher in math and 0.23 σ higher in Hindi over just a 4.5-month period. IV estimates suggest that attending the program for 90 days would increase math and Hindi test scores by 0.6 σ and 0.39 σ respectively. We find similar absolute test score gains for all students, but much greater relative gains for academically-weaker students. Our results suggest that well-designed, technology-aided instruction programs can sharply improve productivity in delivering education.
AB - We study the impact of a personalized technology-aided after-school instruction program in middle-school grades in urban India using a lottery that provided winners with free access to the program. Lottery winners scored 0.37 σ higher in math and 0.23 σ higher in Hindi over just a 4.5-month period. IV estimates suggest that attending the program for 90 days would increase math and Hindi test scores by 0.6 σ and 0.39 σ respectively. We find similar absolute test score gains for all students, but much greater relative gains for academically-weaker students. Our results suggest that well-designed, technology-aided instruction programs can sharply improve productivity in delivering education.
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U2 - 10.1257/aer.20171112
DO - 10.1257/aer.20171112
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85063729670
SN - 0002-8282
VL - 109
SP - 1426
EP - 1460
JO - American Economic Review
JF - American Economic Review
IS - 4
ER -