Adapting for scale: Experimental Evidence on Technology-aided Instruction in India

Karthik Muralidharan and Abhijeet Singh

No 34205, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many interventions that “work” in small-scale trials often fail at scale, highlighting the centrality of effective scaling for realizing the promise of evidence-based policy. We study the scaling of a personalized adaptive learning (PAL) software that was highly effective in a small-scale trial. We adapt the PAL implementation for scalability by integrating it into public school schedules, and experimentally evaluate this adaptation in a more representative sample over 20 times larger than the original study. After 18 months, treated students scored 0.22σ higher in Mathematics and 0.20σ higher in Hindi, a 50–66% productivity increase over the control group. Learning gains were proportional to student time on the platform, providing a simple, low-cost metric for monitoring implementation quality in future scale-ups. The adaptation was cost effective, and its key design features make it widely scalable across diverse settings.

JEL-codes: C93 I21 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-sea
Note: DEV ED LS PE PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34205.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34205

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34205
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().