Do Students Benefit from Blended Instruction? Experimental Evidence from Public Schools in India

This proposal suggests an experimental evaluation to investigate the causal effect of “Avanti Sankalp” – a teacher capacity building program that promotes blended instruction – on student learning. It will be implemented in 240 public secondary schools in Haryana, India, in collaboration with a large, local NGO. The program’s main objective is to positively affect student ability in mathematics and science, in grades nine and ten. The study hypothesizes that student learning improves if teachers are given resources and training, to enrich their instruction with video-based learning materials. Secondly, the study hypothesizes that the intervention’s cost-effectiveness outperforms that of an alternative “light-touch” model of teacher capacity building, which does not rely on education technology and uses printed workbooks only. We expect teaching behaviors and instructional quality to improve due to the program, thus establishing the main mechanisms that lead to students’ learning gains.