What are the most effective ways to get children into school, to keep them there and to ensure that they learn?
A new working paper (and related policy brief) from 3ie aims to answer these very questions.
A key message of the paper is that what helps children learn is different from what gets them into school. While there is evidence that most development interventions in education are helping in some way, some interventions work better than othersto achieve a given outcome.
For example, conditional cash transfers increase school enrolment, attendance and retention but have no overall impact on children’s test scores. School fees subsidies have similar impacts. Scholarship programs, on the other hand, do improve test scores.
The paper also finds that while the use of additional teaching and learning aids enhances student performance, it has no impact on school attendance. In addition, the provision of such materials does not lead to improvements in language test scores. However, computer-aided teaching and learning does have a significant positive impact on mathematics test scores.
The paper says there is a need for more evaluations of some controversial interventions, such as the provision of vouchers for private schooling.
It says also that there is still limited information on both the cost-effectiveness and learning outcomes of many interventions. For example, the limited evidence available on school-based health interventions, such as the often-cited deworming program in Kenya, suggests that while they increase enrolment they might not in fact improve student performance.
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