Engaging Parents to Help Students Catch-Up: Evidence from a Large-Scale RCT in India

The impact of learning losses from full and partial school closures during the pandemic has the potential to impact individual and household livelihoods as well as economic development for decades to come. Given the seriousness of the repercussions of learning losses in general and among students from disadvantaged backgrounds in particular, policymakers and researchers have introduced a variety of programs and policies to help students “catch-up” on the curriculum that they may have missed during full or partial school closures. To help catch students up, policymakers and researchers have often sought to rely on additional levers outside of the traditional set of school inputs, such as additional time after school or greater inputs from households and the community. To date, the cost-effectiveness of such catch-up policies and programs has seldom been rigorously evaluated. The purpose of this study is to examine the cost-effectiveness of one pandemic catch-up intervention—engaging parents in children’s schoolwork by telephone—in improving children’s learning outcomes. To fulfill this purpose, we conduct a randomized controlled trial with 1,128 students and their parents in one rural region of India.