Education

Most articles on international education start out with a well-worn two-part lede: first, developing countries are facing a “learning crisis;” second, there is a mountain of evidence demonstrating the long-term effects of education on everything from personal (and country-level) incomes to health.

Educationists and economists agree that teachers are extremely important. Studies from around the world show that there is huge variance in teacher effectiveness (Hanushek and Rivkin 2006). (Unfortunately, that same research shows that there are few observable differences between effective and ineffective teachers which means that improving the teacher workforce is not just a matter of screening for the right candidates.

For as long as high stakes exams have existed, people have hated them. The system of imperial examinations used to select the mandarins of ancient Chinese dynasties (and the first high-stakes exams) is credited with building an empire.

I’ve spent the past year or so reading a lot of research on education in India. There is obviously a lot of amazing research out there, but there are also a lot of areas where there is far less evidence than I originally expected.

Learning outcomes surveys typically use a school-based sampling strategy – i.e. they randomly select schools and then conduct assessments of all or some portion of students at each selected school.

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.

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.

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.