Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India

Karthik Muralidharan, Abhijeet Singh and Alejandro Ganimian (alejandro_ganimian@mail.harvard.edu)

No 22923, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We present experimental evidence on the impact of a personalized technology-aided after-school instruction program on learning outcomes. Our setting is middle-school grades in urban India, where a lottery provided winning students with a voucher to cover program costs. We find that lottery winners scored 0.36σ higher in math and 0.22σ higher in Hindi relative to lottery losers after just 4.5-months of access to the program. IV estimates suggest that attending the program for 90 days would increase math and Hindi test scores by 0.59σ and 0.36σ respectively. We find similar absolute test score gains for all students, but the relative gain was much greater for academically-weaker students because their rate of learning in the control group was close to zero. We show that the program was able to effectively cater to the very wide variation in student learning levels within a single grade by precisely targeting instruction to the level of student preparation. The program was cost effective, both in terms of productivity per dollar and unit of time. Our results suggest that well-designed technology-aided instruction programs can sharply improve productivity in delivering education.

JEL-codes: C93 I21 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-knm and nep-ure
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Published as Karthik Muralidharan & Abhijeet Singh & Alejandro J. Ganimian, 2019. "Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India," American Economic Review, vol 109(4), pages 1426-1460.

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Related works:
Journal Article: Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India (2019)
Working Paper: Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India (2017)
Working Paper: Disrupting education? Experimental evidence on technology-aided instruction in India (2016)
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