Evaluating the scale-up of a remedial education program in India

Last registered on January 30, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Evaluating the scale-up of a remedial education program in India
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0010873
Initial registration date
January 26, 2023

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
January 30, 2023, 1:57 AM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Affiliation
IDinsight

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Sambodhi Research & Communications Pvt. Ltd.
PI Affiliation
Sambodhi Research & Communications Pvt. Ltd.
PI Affiliation
Sambodhi Research & Communications Pvt. Ltd.

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2022-07-01
End date
2024-06-30
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
The quality of education remains a stumbling block for Indian schoolchildren. According to the 2018 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which assesses a representative sample of students in every district in India, only 27% of children in grade 3 and 50% of children in grade 5 can read at the grade 2-level. 72% of children in grade 5 are unable to complete a subtraction problem from the grade 2 curriculum.

Educate Girls seeks to address educational quality and inequities by recruiting and managing a large staff of field coordinators and a network of community-based volunteers to deliver their programming to tens of thousands of the poorest and most remote villages in India. Educate Girls’ core program involves in-school remedial instruction in reading, math, and English to students in grades 3 to 5 in government primary schools. From 2015 to 2018, Educate Girls participated in a clustered randomized controlled trial of their in-school program across 332 schools, which found that Educate Girls’ program had large positive effects on learning outcomes.

Educate Girls has received funding to scale up their program to 35,000 villages over five years. This evaluation will assess whether Educate Girls can maintain high levels of impact at a much larger scale than was previously assessed. We will conduct a clustered randomized controlled trial from 2022 to 2024 in a sample of 267 expansion villages. Children will be sampled at baseline and assessed after one-year and two-years in basic literacy and math skills.

As of this registration, randomization and baseline data collection have been completed. No outcome data has been collected.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Biswas, Susmit et al. 2023. "Evaluating the scale-up of a remedial education program in India." AEA RCT Registry. January 30. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.10873-1.0
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Educate Girls’ core program involves volunteer-based in-school remedial instruction. Educate Girls field coordinators recruit and train community volunteers (“Team Balika”) who delivered a basic reading, math, and English curriculum ("Gyan ka Pitara" or GKP) to students in grades 3 to 5 in government primary schools.
Intervention Start Date
2022-09-01
Intervention End Date
2024-03-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Learning gains in foundational Hindi literacy, numeracy, and English literacy
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
A modified ASER-style assessment will include modules for each of the three competencies. Scores for each module will be aggregated to determine overall performance in each competency.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
The evaluation will take place in Sidhi, Singhrauli, and Shahdol districts in Madhya Pradesh. Educate Girls has identified 686 eligible villages in these districts based on eligibility criteria and a high predicted number of out-of-school girls. These villages have been divided into 84 Field Coordinator (FC) clusters, with village size per cluster ranging from 6 to 10 villages per cluster.

We have sampled 54 of these 84 clusters using stratified random sampling. Within these 54 clusters, we randomized six schools per cluster into three groups: T1, T2, or C. The two “T1” schools will receive the learning program in Year 1 (2022-23), the two “T2” schools will receive the learning program in Year 2 (2023-24), and the two “C” schools will receive the learning program after the evaluation period (and will serve as the control group). Educate Girls may introduce the program in additional schools following the evaluation period, but since this decision is pending and may not apply across all FC clusters, we ignore these schools for the purposes of the evaluation.

Out of the 324 schools that were randomized in the 54 clusters, 267 will be sampled for student assessments. Some of those schools will be visited twice and others three times. In total, we will make 640 village visits over the course of the two-year evaluation.
 
Students will be sampled from Grades 3, 4, and 5, which are the grades covered by GKP. Students will be selected by using stratified random sampling to sample students based on the number of students in each grade and gender distribution across those grades. We have already sampled from among all students enrolled in Grades 2, 3, and 4 at the end of the 2022-23 school year, in order to have a sample of students in Grades 3, 4, and 5 for the 2023-24 school year.

We estimate that this sample size will enable us to detect 1-year effect sizes of 0.06 SD and 2-year effect sizes of 0.13 SD at 80% power. These calculations use estimates of intracluster correlation and autocorrelation (between baseline and endline scores) from the earlier Educate Girls RCT.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization done by a computer using Stata.
Randomization Unit
School-level randomization.
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
267
Sample size: planned number of observations
8,000 students
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
107 control, 107 treatment for one year, 53 treatment for two years
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
0.06 SD in learning gains for one-year effects, 0.13 for two-year effects
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Sigma Research and Consulting Pvt. Ltd
IRB Approval Date
2022-07-15
IRB Approval Number
N/A
Analysis Plan

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