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.