The impact of educational television on Children's Developmental Outcomes

2023-06-24

2024-03-27

- Literacy Outcomes: Reading Fluency Score, Comprehension Score
- Gender Attitudes: Gender stereotype knowledge and flexibility score, Gender roles, In- and Out-group attitudes
- Socio-emotional lerning: Confidence and Curiosity Score

Literacy Outcomes: employs the Early Grade Reading Assessment Tool (USAID, 2016).
- Reading Fluency Score aggregates scores for letter identification, non-word reading, and oral fluency.
- Comprehension Score aggregates scores for oral and listening comprehension.

Gender Attitudes:
- Gender stereotype knowledge and flexibility score: Following a mapping of which stereotypes are considered “male” or “female” in the literature, responses are coded with “1” if they follow the stereotype, and “0” otherwise. These items are then aggregated into one score denoting the number of gender stereotypes that the child subscribes to. A higher score means that the child has strong gender stereotype knowledge and low stereotype flexibility.
- Gender roles: An aggregate score measuring belief in traditional gender roles. The score aggregates individual questions about different behaviors and traits typically associated with either “male” or “female.” Each child is asked both how likely they are to perform each behavior and how often they actually perform the behavior. Based on each child’s gender and their responses, a final score is constructed denoting the strength of their gender role beliefs. A higher score represents stronger beliefs in traditional gender roles.
- In- and Out-group attitudes: An aggregate score measuring attitudes toward oth- ers with the same and different genders. The score aggregates individual questions about activities with both the in- and out-group. Each child is asked both how willing they are to perform each behavior and how often they actually perform the behavior. Based on each child’s gender and their responses, a final score is con- structed denoting the strength of in-group and out-group attitudes. A higher score represents strong preference for in-groups while a lower score represents flexibility between in- and out-groups.

Socio-Emotional Learning:
- Confidence and Curiosity: We use measures of confidence and curiosity as a proxy for self-efficacy using the RTI confidence and curiosity scale, which has been vali- dated in both our East African context and our age group (Jukes et al., 2021). The score is the simple sum of all items, where relevant items are reverse coded so that a higher final score reflects higher confidence and curiosity. Our main outcome here, defined as the “SEL Score” pools the scores for Confidence and Curiosity.

Evaluate sub-categories of the different main outcomes. We will also explore mechanisms (see pre-analysis plan attached)

We are conducting a school-level cluster randomized controlled trial. Our sampling strategy consisted of 3 stages: (1) identify eligible counties and sub-counties, obtain a random draw; (2) identify eligible schools within randomly selected sub-counties and obtain a random draw; (3) obtained final sample of children within eligible schools.

Schools were randomly assigned to a pure control or treatment condition where they received encouragement to watch the show. For this randomization we employ a “multivariate stratified quadruple matching” technique. Traditionally, pair-wise matching was believed to be the most ideal approach to maximize balance and power in field experiments following Bruhn and McKenzie (2009). However, more recent work suggests a more conservative approach of using quadruplets or larger groups (McKenzie, 2022). We follow this approach by employing quadruplets given our clustered design and moderate number of units within each cluster.

To adopt this approach, we find groups of four clusters, based on a list of baseline characteristics, and randomly assign two into the treatment group, and two into the control group. Quadruplets were matched based on clusters with the lowest Mahalanobis distance cal- culated using these characteristics.

Not available

Randomization done in office by computer

School level

Yes

346 schools

4,373 children

Treatment: 173 schools (2,198 children)
Control: 173 schools (2,175 children)