A Year of Desirable Difficulties: The Impact of Interleaving Math Practice in Nigeria

Michael Kremer, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Joost de Laat and Lotte van der Haar

No 31853, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper tests whether increasing students’ exposure to “desirable difficulties” improves learning in real classrooms. In a year-long field experiment in Nigerian primary schools, interleaved math practice raised short-term test performance by 0.28 standard deviations but had no effect on cumulative end-of-year assessments. Gains were concentrated among lower-achieving students, while higher-achieving students saw little or no benefit. The results suggest that strategies that make learning more effortful can boost short-term mastery but may not produce durable improvements, highlighting the limits of applying laboratory-based cognitive interventions at scale.

JEL-codes: I20 I21 I24 I25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
Note: DEV ED
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31853.pdf (application/pdf)

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:31853

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31853

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 ().