Beyond the Basics: Improving Post-Primary Content Delivery through Classroom Technology

Sabrin A. Beg, Adrienne M. Lucas, Waqas Halim, Umar Saif

NBER Working Paper No. 25704
Issued in March 2019, Revised in June 2019
NBER Program(s):Children, Development Economics, Economics of Education

Using an RCT in middle schools in Pakistan, we test the effect of a government-implemented in-class technology and brief teacher training intervention on student achievement in grade level mathematics and science. After only 4 months of exposure, student test scores increased by 0.2-0.3 standard deviations on math and science tests, 52 to 120 percent more than the control group, and students were more likely to pass the provincially standardized high-stakes exams. Increased effort by both students and teachers indicate a complementarity between technology and other inputs in education production. At a scale of 100 schools, this program is extremely cost-effective.

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Supplementary materials for this paper:

• randomized controlled trials registry entry

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w25704