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ASER Centre recently released results from a survey of learning levels in Karnataka conducted earlier this year. To my knowledge this is the first rigorous, sample-based survey of learning levels in India during COVID which is representative of a larger population.

In a recent article Andres Parrado and I take a look at the two main sources of learning outcomes data in India – NAS and ASER – and conclude that a) NAS data is (most likely) completely unreliable and b) ASER data, while reliable, is a bit noisy.

There are many instances where you have a bunch of variables and you need to boil them down to one or just a few. For example, you may be testing the effect of an education program on students’ confidence, self-efficacy, and learning levels.

TLDR; The experience of RSBY, a government subsidized health insurance program, shows why India desperately needs civil service reform. RSBY showed early promise but ultimately failed because state RSBY teams were unable to perform basic monitoring tasks that even a small, reasonably competent team could have accomplished.

Researchers at the World Bank recently released an excellent new dataset on learning outcomes by country.The dataset is here and a journal article describing the dataset is here. This is the first dataset on learning outcomes (rather than educational attainment) which includes most low income countries.

In my last blog post, I shared some thoughts on Sarah Rose’s excellent recent working paper on how USAID could become more evidence based. TLDR: I argue that USAID doesn’t necessarily need to generate evidence (since there are plenty of other orgs that do that) but it does need to the use the latest and best evidence.

Sarah Rose at the Center for Global Development recently published an excellent note on how to make USAID programming more evidence-based. As a former member of one of the groups mentioned in the article (the Evaluation and Impact Assessment group at the erstwhile Global Development Lab) and a long-time evaluator, this is a topic dear to my cold, data-driven heart.

I recently used data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) for a paper on learning outcomes data in India. IHDS is a panel survey led by Sonalde Desai and others at NCAER/UofMd which collected on a wide range of topics from ~42,000 households across India.

Andres Parrado and I recently wrote an article in which we look at the reliability of learning outcomes data in India. The main findings of the paper are a) the government-run survey of learning outcomes (called the NAS) likely contains a lot of noise and b) the main independent survey of learning outcomes (ASER) is a tad bit noisier than the survey’s sample size would lead one to believe.

A couple of weeks ago, Rob Sampson and I published an op-ed in Quartz India arguing that the central and state governments in India should use Educational TV rather than smartphone-based EdTech to reach students out of school due to the covid crisis.