Targeted Remedial Education: Experimental Evidence from Peru

Juan Saavedra, Emma Naslund-Hadley and Mariana Alfonso

No 23050, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: An outstanding challenge in education is improving learning among low-achieving students. We present results from the first randomized experiment of an inquiry-based remedial science-education program for low-performing elementary students in the setting of a developing country. At 48 low-income public elementary schools in Lima, Peru and surrounding areas, third-grade students scoring in the bottom half of their science classes were selected at random to receive up to 16 remedial sessions of 90 minutes each during the school year. Control-group compliance with assignment (no extra tutoring) was close to perfect. Treatment-group compliance was roughly 40 percent, or five to six remedial sessions—a 4 to 5 percent increase in total science instruction time over the school year. Despite the low-intensity treatment, students assigned to the remedial sessions scored 0.12 standard deviations higher on a science endline test. But all improvements were concentrated among boys, for whom gains were 0.22 standard deviations. Remedial education does not produce within-student spillovers to math, or spillovers on other students.

JEL-codes: I21 I25 O15 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-exp and nep-ure
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