Abstract
The status of elementary education in developing countries, particularly India, is very poor. Reports suggest that children’s enrollment rates in school are as high as 95% in the country but less than 50% of these enrolled children can perform basic reading and arithmetic tasks. This suggests that the participation in schooling is not getting translated into actual human capital accumulation, which is likely to have adverse labor market consequences in the long run.While there are several ways one could try and improve learning levels of children through demand side interventions like conditional cash transfers or in-kind transfers and gifts, there is not much convincing evidence of success of these initiatives. On the other hand, supply side interventions such as improving school infrastructure, providing better quality teachers, integrating technology in teaching have also been tried with limited success. In this backdrop, the new National Education Policy (NEP) has been launched by the government of India in 2020, which emphasizes innovative pedagogy in attempting to achieve the targeted levels of learning. In line with this, we are interested in understanding the role of alternative ways of teaching and pedagogical innovations in improvement of cognitive as well as non-cognitive development of children. Specifically, we want to estimate if “art-integrated” learning can improve academic outcomes of children. The underlying hypothesis would be that traditional teaching approaches may be relatively less attractive to children, particularly from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds with low base levels of family education. Consequently, the major emphasis should be to make these children attracted to learning and putting efforts towards human capital accumulation by making the curriculum more interesting yet less challenging to grasp. Integrating the pedagogy with art forms such as music, dance, theatre etc. may enable superior cognition and attention from these children which eventually could lead to higher academic achievement..