Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/122/3/1235/1879525 by Tulane University Library, Serials Acquisitions Dept. user on 06 February 2025
REMEDYING EDUCATION: EVIDENCE FROM TWO
RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENTS IN INDIA*
ABHIJIT V. BANERJEE
SHAWN COLE
ESTHER DUFLO
LEIGH LINDEN
This paper presents the results of two randomized experiments conducted in
schools in urban India. A remedial education program hired young women to
teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills. It increased
average test scores of all children in treatment schools by 0.28 standard deviation,
mostly due to large gains experienced by children at the bottom of the test-score
distribution. A computer-assisted learning program focusing on math increased
math scores by 0.47 standard deviation. One year after the programs were over,
initial gains remained significant for targeted children, but they faded to about
0.10 standard deviation.
I. INTRODUCTION
The recent World Development Report on “Making Services
Work for Poor People” [World Bank 2004] illustrates well the
essential tension in the public conversation about primary edu-
cation in developing countries. On the one hand, the report em-
braces the broad agreement, now enshrined in the Millennium
Development Goals, that primary education should be universal.
On the other hand, it describes in detail the dismal quality of the
educational services that developing countries offer to the poor.
For example, a 2005 India-wide survey on educational attain-
ment found that 44 percent of the children aged 7–12 cannot read
a basic paragraph, and 50 percent cannot do simple subtraction
[Pratham 2005] even though most are enrolled in school. Even in
urban India, where widespread absenteeism by students and
* This project was a collaborative exercise involving many people. Foremost,
we are deeply indebted to the Pratham team, who made the evaluation possible
and put up with endless requests for new data: Pratima Bandekar, Rukmini
Banerji, Lekha Bhatt, Madhav Chavan, Shekhar Hardikar, Rajashree Kabare,
Aditya Natraj, and many others. We thank Jim Berry, Marc Shotland, Mukesh
Prajapati, and Nandit Bhatt for their excellent work coordinating the fieldwork
and for their remarkable work in developing and improving the CAL program.
Kartini Shastry provided superb research assistance. Two editors and three
referees provided very useful comments. We also thank Joshua Angrist, Angus
Deaton, Rachel Glennerster, Michael Kremer, Alan Krueger, Victor Lavy, and
Caroline Minter-Hoxby for their comments. For financial support, we thank the
ICICI corporation, the World Bank, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2007
1235
, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/122/3/1235/1879525 by Tulane University Library, Serials Acquisitions Dept. user on 06 February 2025
1236 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
teachers is not an issue, the learning levels are very low: in
Vadodara, a major Indian city and a site for the study in this
paper, only 19.5 percent of the students enrolled in grade 3 can
correctly answer questions testing grade 1 math competencies.
In these conditions, policies that promote school enrollment
may not promote learning. And indeed, the recent evidence sug-
gests that many interventions, which increase school participa-
tion, do not improve test scores for the average student.1 Students
often seem not to learn anything in the additional days that they
spend at school.2
It is therefore clear that efforts to get children into school
must be accompanied by significant improvements in the quality
of schools that serve these children. The problem is that while we
now know a reasonable amount about how to get children into
school, much less is known about how to improve school quality in
a cost-effective way. Worse still, a number of rigorous, random-
ized evaluations have confirmed that spending more on resources
like textbooks [Glewwe, Kremer, and Moulin 2002], flip charts
[Glewwe et al. 2004], or additional teachers [Banerjee, Jacob, and
Kremer 2004] has no impact on children’s test scores (see Glewwe
and Kremer [forthcoming] for discussions and more references).
These results have led to a general skepticism about the ability of
interventions focusing on inputs to make a difference (echoing
Hanushek’s [1986 and 1995] earlier assessment for both the U. S.
and developing countries) and have led many, including the
above-mentioned World Development Report, to advocate more
systemic reforms designed to change the incentives faced by
teachers, parents, and children.
It is not clear, however, that we know enough to entirely give
up on inputs. Based on existing evidence, it remains possible that
additional inputs actually can work but only if they address
specific unmet needs in the school.
Ironically, the difficulty in improving the quality of education
may in part be a by-product of the success in getting more chil-
dren to attend school. Neither the pedagogy nor the curriculum
has been adapted to take into account the influx of children and
their characteristics: many of these children are first generation
1. These include giving children deworming drugs [Miguel and Kremer 2004]
and providing school meals for children [Vermeersch and Kremer 2005].
2. This is true when evaluating only children who were enrolled before the
intervention, suggesting this result is not due to a change in the composition of the
children.
, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/122/3/1235/1879525 by Tulane University Library, Serials Acquisitions Dept. user on 06 February 2025
REMEDYING EDUCATION 1237
learners whose parents are not in a position to follow what is
happening in school or to react if their child falls behind. Yet, in
many countries, the school system continues to operate as if it
were catering to the elite. This may explain why just providing
more inputs to the existing system or more school days is often
ineffective. For many children, neither more inputs nor an extra
day makes much of a difference because what is being taught in
class is too hard for them. For example, Glewwe, Kremer, and
Moulin [2002] found that new textbooks make no difference for
the test scores of the average child but do help those who had
already done well on the pretest. The authors suggest that this
is because the textbooks were written in English (the language
of instruction, in theory), which for most children is the third
language.
Taken together, these results suggest that inputs specifically
targeted to helping weaker students learn may be effective.
This paper reports the results from randomized evaluations
of two programs that provide supplementary inputs to children in
schools that cater to children from poor families in urban India.
The first intervention is specifically targeted to the weakest chil-
dren: it is a remedial education program, where a young woman
(“Balsakhi”) from the community works on basic skills with chil-
dren who have reached grade 3 or 4 without having mastered
them. These children are taken out of the regular classroom to
work with this young woman for two hours per day (the school
day is about four hours). The second intervention is addressed to
all children but is adapted to each child’s current level of achieve-
ment. It is a computer-assisted learning program where children
in grade 4 are offered two hours of shared computer time per
week during which they play games that involve solving math
problems whose level of difficulty responds to their ability to solve
them. Both programs were implemented by Pratham, a very large
NGO operating in conjunction with government schools in India.
The remedial education was run in Mumbai (formerly known as
Bombay) and Vadodara (formerly known as Baroda), two of the
most important cities in western India. The Computer-Assisted
Learning Program was run only in Vadodara.
In contrast to the disappointing results of the earlier litera-
ture, we find that both programs had a substantial positive effect
on children’s academic achievement, at least in the short run.
This is true in both years and cities, despite the instability of the
environment (notably major communal riots in Vadodara in 2002,
REMEDYING EDUCATION: EVIDENCE FROM TWO
RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENTS IN INDIA*
ABHIJIT V. BANERJEE
SHAWN COLE
ESTHER DUFLO
LEIGH LINDEN
This paper presents the results of two randomized experiments conducted in
schools in urban India. A remedial education program hired young women to
teach students lagging behind in basic literacy and numeracy skills. It increased
average test scores of all children in treatment schools by 0.28 standard deviation,
mostly due to large gains experienced by children at the bottom of the test-score
distribution. A computer-assisted learning program focusing on math increased
math scores by 0.47 standard deviation. One year after the programs were over,
initial gains remained significant for targeted children, but they faded to about
0.10 standard deviation.
I. INTRODUCTION
The recent World Development Report on “Making Services
Work for Poor People” [World Bank 2004] illustrates well the
essential tension in the public conversation about primary edu-
cation in developing countries. On the one hand, the report em-
braces the broad agreement, now enshrined in the Millennium
Development Goals, that primary education should be universal.
On the other hand, it describes in detail the dismal quality of the
educational services that developing countries offer to the poor.
For example, a 2005 India-wide survey on educational attain-
ment found that 44 percent of the children aged 7–12 cannot read
a basic paragraph, and 50 percent cannot do simple subtraction
[Pratham 2005] even though most are enrolled in school. Even in
urban India, where widespread absenteeism by students and
* This project was a collaborative exercise involving many people. Foremost,
we are deeply indebted to the Pratham team, who made the evaluation possible
and put up with endless requests for new data: Pratima Bandekar, Rukmini
Banerji, Lekha Bhatt, Madhav Chavan, Shekhar Hardikar, Rajashree Kabare,
Aditya Natraj, and many others. We thank Jim Berry, Marc Shotland, Mukesh
Prajapati, and Nandit Bhatt for their excellent work coordinating the fieldwork
and for their remarkable work in developing and improving the CAL program.
Kartini Shastry provided superb research assistance. Two editors and three
referees provided very useful comments. We also thank Joshua Angrist, Angus
Deaton, Rachel Glennerster, Michael Kremer, Alan Krueger, Victor Lavy, and
Caroline Minter-Hoxby for their comments. For financial support, we thank the
ICICI corporation, the World Bank, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
© 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2007
1235
, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/122/3/1235/1879525 by Tulane University Library, Serials Acquisitions Dept. user on 06 February 2025
1236 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
teachers is not an issue, the learning levels are very low: in
Vadodara, a major Indian city and a site for the study in this
paper, only 19.5 percent of the students enrolled in grade 3 can
correctly answer questions testing grade 1 math competencies.
In these conditions, policies that promote school enrollment
may not promote learning. And indeed, the recent evidence sug-
gests that many interventions, which increase school participa-
tion, do not improve test scores for the average student.1 Students
often seem not to learn anything in the additional days that they
spend at school.2
It is therefore clear that efforts to get children into school
must be accompanied by significant improvements in the quality
of schools that serve these children. The problem is that while we
now know a reasonable amount about how to get children into
school, much less is known about how to improve school quality in
a cost-effective way. Worse still, a number of rigorous, random-
ized evaluations have confirmed that spending more on resources
like textbooks [Glewwe, Kremer, and Moulin 2002], flip charts
[Glewwe et al. 2004], or additional teachers [Banerjee, Jacob, and
Kremer 2004] has no impact on children’s test scores (see Glewwe
and Kremer [forthcoming] for discussions and more references).
These results have led to a general skepticism about the ability of
interventions focusing on inputs to make a difference (echoing
Hanushek’s [1986 and 1995] earlier assessment for both the U. S.
and developing countries) and have led many, including the
above-mentioned World Development Report, to advocate more
systemic reforms designed to change the incentives faced by
teachers, parents, and children.
It is not clear, however, that we know enough to entirely give
up on inputs. Based on existing evidence, it remains possible that
additional inputs actually can work but only if they address
specific unmet needs in the school.
Ironically, the difficulty in improving the quality of education
may in part be a by-product of the success in getting more chil-
dren to attend school. Neither the pedagogy nor the curriculum
has been adapted to take into account the influx of children and
their characteristics: many of these children are first generation
1. These include giving children deworming drugs [Miguel and Kremer 2004]
and providing school meals for children [Vermeersch and Kremer 2005].
2. This is true when evaluating only children who were enrolled before the
intervention, suggesting this result is not due to a change in the composition of the
children.
, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/122/3/1235/1879525 by Tulane University Library, Serials Acquisitions Dept. user on 06 February 2025
REMEDYING EDUCATION 1237
learners whose parents are not in a position to follow what is
happening in school or to react if their child falls behind. Yet, in
many countries, the school system continues to operate as if it
were catering to the elite. This may explain why just providing
more inputs to the existing system or more school days is often
ineffective. For many children, neither more inputs nor an extra
day makes much of a difference because what is being taught in
class is too hard for them. For example, Glewwe, Kremer, and
Moulin [2002] found that new textbooks make no difference for
the test scores of the average child but do help those who had
already done well on the pretest. The authors suggest that this
is because the textbooks were written in English (the language
of instruction, in theory), which for most children is the third
language.
Taken together, these results suggest that inputs specifically
targeted to helping weaker students learn may be effective.
This paper reports the results from randomized evaluations
of two programs that provide supplementary inputs to children in
schools that cater to children from poor families in urban India.
The first intervention is specifically targeted to the weakest chil-
dren: it is a remedial education program, where a young woman
(“Balsakhi”) from the community works on basic skills with chil-
dren who have reached grade 3 or 4 without having mastered
them. These children are taken out of the regular classroom to
work with this young woman for two hours per day (the school
day is about four hours). The second intervention is addressed to
all children but is adapted to each child’s current level of achieve-
ment. It is a computer-assisted learning program where children
in grade 4 are offered two hours of shared computer time per
week during which they play games that involve solving math
problems whose level of difficulty responds to their ability to solve
them. Both programs were implemented by Pratham, a very large
NGO operating in conjunction with government schools in India.
The remedial education was run in Mumbai (formerly known as
Bombay) and Vadodara (formerly known as Baroda), two of the
most important cities in western India. The Computer-Assisted
Learning Program was run only in Vadodara.
In contrast to the disappointing results of the earlier litera-
ture, we find that both programs had a substantial positive effect
on children’s academic achievement, at least in the short run.
This is true in both years and cities, despite the instability of the
environment (notably major communal riots in Vadodara in 2002,
