2022

Promoting Literacy Through Cognitive Science: Experimental Evidence from Morocco

Researchers:
  • Helen Abadzi
  • Abdellah Chekayri
  • Mei-Ching Lien
  • Todd Pugatch
Location:
Morocco
Type:
  • Pilot project
Morocco ranked 48th of 50 countries in the most recent international study of primary school literacy (PIRLS). A key problem faced by Moroccan students learning to read is the difference between the colloquial Arabic used at home and the formal Arabic (Modern...

2021

Anandam Pathyacharya Curriculum

Researchers:
Location:
Uttarakhand
Type:
  • Pilot project
The Anandam Pathyacharya happiness curriculum was developed by the Dream a Dream foundation in partnership with the government of Uttarakhand, India, and will be implemented in grades 1-8 across Uttarakhand public schools. The curriculum consists of daily...

Understanding the Diffusion and Impacts of Educational Technology: Evidence from Peru

Researchers:
  • Roberto Araya
  • Elena Arias
  • Julian Cristia
  • Santiago Cueto
  • Carolina Mendez
  • Julian Messina
Location:
Lima
Type:
  • Full project
This project explores the adoption, diffusion, and impacts of an online math curriculum specifically designed to provide a more equitable environment for remote learning and promote remedial education in preparation for school reopening. 187 schools from the...

Gender Violence and School Achievement in Mozambique

Researchers:
  • Sofia Amaral
  • Aixa Garcia-Ramos
  • Alejandra Ramos
  • Maria Micaela Sviatschi
Type:
  • Full project
Globally, school related gender-based violence (GBV) is widespread and the rate of impunity of such crimes is very high. How can this form of violence in schools be prevented? Can improvements in information frictions of girls, boys, and teachers change social...

2020

Rapid Assessment of Rwanda’s ICT Capacity to Deliver Remote Learning

Researchers:
  • Sarah Kabay
  • Andrew Zeitlin
Location:
Rwanda
Type:
  • Pilot project
The Rwanda Education Board (REB) has had a longstanding interest in utilizing ICT in its classrooms and education system more broadly. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated school closures have placed renewed and heightened emphasis on education ICT. Based on...

COVID-19’s effect on the supply of schooling services in developing countries

Researchers:
Location:
Dominican Republic and Peru
Type:
  • Pilot project
COVID-19 has upended the education sector, with schools closing and shifting to remote instruction. There is increasing concern that in many developing countries where low cost private schools are a large share of the market that COVID-19 closure could lead to...

Scalable low-technology interventions to track and minimize learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic

Researchers:
Location:
Botswana
Type:
  • Pilot project
With over 1.5 billion learners out of school, the COVID-19 pandemic has paralyzed education systems worldwide. This necessitates new education models, including the use of education technology for distance learning. Many efforts to date have focused on higher...

Long-Term Impacts of Subsidized Dual Apprenticeships in Cote d’Ivoire

Researchers:
Location:
Cote d'Ivoire
Type:
  • Other
This is a long-term follow-up survey as part of an RCT of a subsidized dual apprenticeship program combining on-the-job and theoretical training in Côte d’Ivoire. This project benefitted from an earlier round of PPE funding, which allowed the research team to...

Digital Education Response to Covid-19 in Pakistan

Researchers:
Location:
Pakistan
Type:
  • Pilot project
Due to the unprecedented global outbreak of COVID-19, the education sector worldwide is experiencing a unique crisis. Schools across the world have shut down and children could potentially be out of school for several months. In a country like Pakistan, where...

2019

The Effect of School Information on Supply, Demand, and Equilibrium Outcomes

Researchers:
  • Mauricio Romero
  • Cristian Sanchez
Type:
  • Project development grant
Often parents and students are misinformed about school quality. This is problematic, since accountability through school choice or by voicing concerns (e.g., through parent-teacher associations) could dramatically improve the performance of school systems. A...

Spotlight Avoidance and Role Models

Researchers:
  • Michela Carlana
  • Raissa Fabregas
  • Diana Moreira
Type:
  • Pilot project
Information about the success of women and minorities can be considered a public good if it changes perceptions about what talented students from underrepresented backgrounds think they can achieve. Concerns around social image and modesty norms, however...

Mitigating Peer Violence and Crime in Post Primary Schools

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
About a quarter of school-age children in the world report to experience some sort of peer violence at school. Research shows that experiencing verbal and physical bullying at school during crucial developmental periods, particularly in adolescence, may have...

Understanding School-Based Violence Networks in Ghana

Researchers:
Type:
  • Pilot project
School-based violence is a pervasive issue worldwide and harms children’s physical and emotional well-being. While data exist describing students’ reported experiences of violence, little is known about the more complex dynamics within schools of perceived...

Breaking Down Caste Barriers

Researchers:
Type:
  • Pilot project
Exclusionary stereotypes, biased attitudes and deep-rooted prejudices continue to hinder integration of historically “backward” castes in India into the mainstream economy. By increasing interaction between members of different groups, affirmative action...

The Persistent Impacts of Targeted Instruction at Scale

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
Studies from Ghana and India show that teaching to the learning level of primary school students instead of the grade level—“targeted instruction”—improves foundational literacy and numeracy. As this program has spread to 11 African countries, this study...

What is it about Mindset?

Researchers:
  • Guilherme Lichand
  • Mari Rege
  • Ana Trindade Ribeiro
  • David Yeager
Type:
  • Full project
Recent evidence documents that low-cost interventions aimed at giving teenagers a growth mindset have very sizable and positive effects on their test scores and on high school drop-out rates. In a partnership with Rio de Janeiro State Secretary of Education...

Learning to See a World of Opportunities

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
As an emotional and motivational amplifier, imagery could be an effective pedagogical tool for boosting student motivation, learning how to learn and thinking about the future. Yet its educational value remains underexplored. To address this gap, we have...

Learning to See a World of Opportunities

Researchers:
Location:
Colombia
Type:
  • Full project
As an emotional and motivational amplifier, imagery could be an effective pedagogical tool for boosting student motivation, learning how to learn and thinking about the future. Yet its educational value remains underexplored. To address this gap, we have...

2018

STRYDE: Soft skills training in Tanzania

Researchers:
  • Margherita Calderone
  • Nathan Fiala
  • Annekathrin Schoofs
  • Rachel Steinacher
Type:
  • Full project
Youth unemployment is an increasing concern in countries across the developing world, including Tanzania. Many governments and international organizations are encouraging self-employment through micro- and small-enterprise development as a solution. Because...

Building School Management Capacity in India

Type:
  • Full project
Growing evidence shows that schools with better management practices achieve better results. Yet, little evidence exists on how to improve these practices—especially in developing countries. Most prior studies have sought to influence school management by...

A/B Testing Education Production: Bridge Academies

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
Bridge International Academies designed and is piloting, using random assignment, three programs to improve student learning in grades 5 through 8 across approximately 500 academies located in Kenya and Nigeria. To increase the quality of these three RCTs and...

High School Youth Entrepreneurship and Leadership Training in Uganda

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
This project studies the long-term impacts of Educate!, an innovative upper-secondary school-based intervention in Uganda designed to enhance adolescents’ technical and soft-skills and to improve their success in formal employment and entrepreneurial...

The Impacts of Automated Essay Scoring on Writing Skills and Access to College

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
Artificial intelligence has the potential of – perfectly or imperfectly – substituting time-intensive teacher tasks. However, evidence on whether and how this impacts learning is still scant. We propose a randomized evaluation of a program that uses automated...

Cash Transfers, Growth Mindsets, and Student Learning

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
Demand-side interventions have proved effective at increasing education participation in developing countries, including for marginalized subgroups. However, there is less evidence showing that these classes of interventions improve learning outcomes. We study...

How Do Principals Reward Teachers? Understanding Subjective Performance Pay

Researchers:
This project measures the direct incentive effect and sorting effect of incentivizing teachers based a subjective measure, their principal’s evaluation of them, compared to incentives based on percentile value added or no incentive pay. Existing work has shown...

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

Researchers:
Location:
Haryana
Type:
  • Full project
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...

2017

Impact and Mechanisms: Why Education Matters for Women Empowerment: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Niger

Type:
  • Full project
We measure the impact of a program designed to improve adolescent girls' human capital through the distribution of secondary education scholarships in Niger, where women face among the starkest gender inequalities in the world. In order to measure the impact...

Biased Beliefs and the Dynamic Role of Information in College Choice

Researchers:
  • Claudia Allende
  • Magdalena Bennett
  • Peter Bergman
Type:
  • Full project
Even though information frictions have been widely studied regarding decisions involving higher education, most research has studied these frictions as static, overlooking the dynamic component that might be embedded in the process. In this study, we will...

Medium-term Impact of Apprenticeship on Youth

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
With one of the lowest primary completion rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, youth in Côte d'Ivoire lack the necessary skills to engage in productive employment. In this context, apprenticeship programs are a major source of post-primary education in West Africa...

2016

Returns to Post-Primary Education in Peru

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
We evaluate how public school students in Peru develop their preferences across different fields of study, their beliefs regarding their own talents and the feasibility of attending college, and how these beliefs affect their decisions along several margins...

Effective Teacher Coaching – Improving student outcomes in Mexico

Researchers:
  • Susan W. Parker
  • Lucrecia Santibanez
Type:
  • Full project
In this project, we propose a pilot teacher-coaching program in the state of Sonora, in Mexico. The program would be implemented with lower secondary teachers in 50 of the country's "telesecundaria" and technical secondary schools (7-9th grade). We will...

Targeting & Incentives in Ghana’s National Apprenticeship Program

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
Youth unemployment is a major policy problem in Sub-Saharan Africa. Apprenticeships are a promising avenue to address youth unemployment as they provide relevant occupational skills training and work experience in the private sector. In this project we conduct...

2015

Leveraging Curriculum Reform: An Evaluation of Curriculum Reform Support Programs for Entrepreneurship Teachers in Rwanda

Researchers:
  • Moussa Blimpo
  • Todd Pugatch
Type:
  • Full project
At least ten countries across Africa, including Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia and Namibia, are currently undergoing secondary curriculum reforms to teach youth the skills they need to succeed after school. Yet many of these reforms are not effective due to...

Educational Mismatch and Motivational Messages in the Dominican Republic

Researchers:
Location:
Dominican Republic
Type:
  • Full project
Dropout is a common problem in junior and senior high schools across many developing countries. The Dominican Republic is no different: 38 percent of students taking national exams in 8th grade drop out by the next set of high-stake exams in 12th grade...

Examining the impact and cost‐effectiveness of supplementary math courses with a focus on girls on Benin

Researchers:
Location:
Benin
Type:
  • Full project
In Benin, as elsewhere in the world, education of girls lags behind that of boys in a number of dimensions, e.g. enrollment, promotion and graduation rates. While these measures have seen some improvement in the recent years, they do not guarantee that neither...

Teacher training and Entrepreneurship Education: Evidence from a Curriculum Reform in Rwanda

Researchers:
  • Moussa Blimpo
  • Todd Pugatch
Location:
Rwanda
Type:
  • Full project
At least ten countries across Africa, including Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia and Namibia, are currently undergoing secondary curriculum reforms to teach youth the skills they need to succeed after school. Yet many of these reforms are not effective due to...

What about the parents? Designing post-primary policies that encourage parent investment

Researchers:
Location:
Malawi
Type:
  • Pilot project
The effects of education policies depend on individuals’ behavioral responses, which can either enhance or undo the policies’ intended impacts. This project aims to understand one important aspect of parental behavior -- how parents allocate their investments...

2014

Information Targeting, School Choice, and School Quality in Ghana

Researchers:
  • Kehinde Ajayi
  • Willa Friedman
  • Adrienne Lucas
Location:
Ghana
Type:
  • Full project
This study identifies the impact of information on demand for education. We will provide a randomly selected group of Ghanaian junior high school students with application strategies and information about the selectivity and exam performance of secondary...

Empowering Adolescent Girls: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Sierra Leone

Researchers:
  • Oriana Bandiera
  • Niklas Buehren
  • Markus Goldstein
  • Imran Rasul
Location:
Sierra Leone
Type:
  • Full project
Pregnancy and early childbearing can limit teenage girls' human capital accumulation and labor force participation. At the same time, a lack of skills and limited labor market opportunities increase teenage girls' financial dependency on men, possibly leading...

Evaluation of the Indian National Employability Through Apprenticeship Program

Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
To address critically high levels of youth unemployment and under-employment, as well as an apparent mismatch between youth’s skills versus those demanded by employers, the Indian Government has established a new Public-Private Partnership: the National...

Leveraging Technology to Increase Student Effort and Improve Learning Outcomes

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
This project aims to leverage a technology-based learning model to both increase the supply of high quality education and to increase the demand for learning (through incentives for student effort). The Nalanda project is developing and deploying a scalable...

Not Informed, Not Allowed, or Not Wanted? Understanding Supply and Demand-side Constraints to Vocational Training and Post-Placement Tenure for India's Young Rural Females

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Pilot project
Together with India's Aajeevika Skills program, which will provide vocational training for 5 million unemployed rural youth between 2012 and 2017, we propose a pilot study on how to more effectively integrate rural young women into the labor force. We will...

Encouraging Youth Entrepreneurship in Kenya: A Study of Vocational Training and Cash Grants

Researchers:
Location:
Kenya
Type:
  • Full project
This project will examine the effectiveness of potentially complementary interventions aimed at boosting the employability of youth and the productivity of their self-employment ventures in a less-developed country. In particular, we seek to compare and...

2013

SMS-Based School-Parents Communication Technology

Researchers:
Location:
Chile
Type:
  • Full project
We propose to test the effectiveness of sending parents high frequency SMS messages with information on their children’s activities and behavior at school, as well as advice on parental involvement with the school. Our main hypothesis is that frequent text...

Pricing of Private Education in Urban India: Demand, Use, and Impact

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
There is a large market for education services for children in the developing world, with many of these services provided by private education service providers. Yet little is known about how prices influence demand and utilization of these services. This...

Negotiating a Better Future

Researchers:
Location:
Zambia
Type:
  • Full project
School data for Zambia shows a dramatic decline in female enrollment around the transition to fee-based secondary school. Moreover, young women of this age in Zambia contract HIV at twice the rate of young men. We propose that the ability to communicate within...

Soft versus Hard Skills in Entrepreneurial Success: Evidence from Post-Secondary Entrepreneurship Training Interventions in Uganda

Researchers:
Location:
Uganda
Type:
  • Full project
Business and labor market successes are thought to depend on a series of economic/business "hard" skills and social-emotional "soft" skills. Soft skills include self-regulation, self-actualization, communication, win-win judgment, persona power, negotiation...

Empowering Girls in Rural Bangladesh

Location:
Bangladesh
Type:
  • Full project
Adolescent girls in Bangladesh are seeing increased rates of enrollment in secondary school, but face high rates of drop out and early marriage, which curtail formal and informal skill acquisition. This study follows adolescent girls who took part in a program...

Evaluating a School-Based Gender Sensitization Program in India

Researchers:
Location:
India
Type:
  • Full project
This study is a randomized evaluation of a secondary-school-based attitude-change program aimed at promoting gender equality, reducing son preference in reproductive decisions, and improving girls’ school enrollment. The premise is that a promising way to...

Making Decisions for a Better Future: The Dynamic Complementarities of Educational Information Interventions in Peru

Researchers:
Type:
  • Full project
We evaluate how public school students in Peru develop their preferences across different fields of study, their beliefs regarding their own talents and the feasibility of attending college, and how these beliefs affect their decisions along several margins...

Can Incentives Mitigate Educational Triage in Upper Primary: Evidence from Uganda

Researchers:
  • Daniel Gilligan
  • Naureen Karachiwalla
  • Ibrahim Kasirye
  • Derek Neal
Type:
  • Full project
We conjecture that primary leaving exam systems in Africa create educational triage, limiting educational opportunities for many students. Because leaving exam results receive significant public scrutiny, educators face incentives to devote resources to...

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