Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India

Abstract

The authors present experimental evidence on the impact of a personalized technology-aided after-school instruction program on learning outcomes. The setting is middle-school grades in urban India, where a lottery provided winning students with a voucher to cover program costs. They find that lottery winners scored 0.36σ higher in math and 0.22σ higher in Hindi relative to lottery losers after just 4.5-months of access to the program. IV estimates suggest that attending the program for 90 days would increase math and Hindi test scores by 0.59σ and 0.36σ respectively. The researchers find similar absolute test score gains for all students, but the relative gain was much greater for academically-weaker students because their rate of learning in the control group was close to zero. They show that the program was able to effectively cater to the very wide variation in student learning levels within a single grade by precisely targeting instruction to the level of student preparation. The program was cost effective, both in terms of productivity per dollar and unit of time. The results suggest that well-designed technology-aided instruction programs can sharply improve productivity in delivering education.