Tutoring Online Project in the Dominican Republic (Year 1)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, public schools in the Dominican Republic (DR) have been closed since early March. Ongoing school closures are expected to lead to learning losses and increased dropout rates, especially among the most vulnerable. In the absence of compensatory actions, the COVID-19 pandemic poses the risk of exacerbating low learning levels and increasing current inequalities. The Tutoring Online Project (TOP) aims to mitigate these losses by offering personalized tutoring to public school students in the DR. This intervention will be implemented by J-PAL Latin America and the Caribbean (J-PAL LAC) and the Ministry of Education in public secondary schools in the country, leveraging partnerships with universities. TOP will recruit 200 volunteer university students and randomly match them with 300 students from disadvantaged backgrounds in public schools. The project has been already implemented and evaluated in Italy in 2020. We plan to adapt the TOP effective model to the DR context and to develop an online platform that will be available beyond the first implementation phase and across countries.