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Targeted Teaching to Improve Learning in Secondary School

Last registered on January 05, 2020
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Targeted Teaching to Improve Learning in Secondary School
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0004138
Initial registration date
December 29, 2019

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 05, 2020, 11:38 PM EST

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

Locations

Country
India
Region
Odisha

Primary Investigator

Name
Jason Kerwin
Affiliation
University of Washington
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Sabrin Beg
PI Affiliation
University of Delaware
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PI Name
Adrienne Lucas
PI Affiliation
University of Delaware
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PI Name
Anne Fitzpatrick
PI Affiliation
University of Massachusetts
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PI Name
Khandker Wahedur Rahman
PI Affiliation
University of Minnesota
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Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2019-06-24
End date
2020-03-31
Keywords
Education
Additional Keywords
secondary school, remedial learning
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
Abstract
Although India has made tremendous progress in expanding access to primary and secondary school, a large number of children who are enrolled in Class 9 lack basic foundational skills. Previous work using a randomized controlled trial in Uttar Pradesh, India using specialized training periods—“camps”—demonstrated substantial increases in student learning for primary school students (Banerjee et al., 2016). These results suggest that remedial camps are a promising approach to improving overall educational attainment and transforming student outcomes.

The Secondary School Readiness Program (SSRP), developed by the Kusuma Trust (KT), consists of a series of camps that prepare students in class 9 with the skills that they need to pass their board exams. These camps occur in three phases depending upon student learning levels, and are tailored towards remedial learners. These camps operate within the typical school day and use existing teachers, making this approach potentially cost-effective as well as the program is planned to scale up across the state.

As programs scale-up, tension emerges between harmonizing content to ensure uniform implementation and allowing flexibility to adapt to school-specific needs and conditions. On the one hand, monitoring teachers and enforcing a set schedule and lesson plan can ensure teachers follow best practices and implement programs as designed. On the other hand, teachers may be best informed on how to adapt a program to optimally meet the needs of their students and the school. We propose to measure the impact of implementing SSRP in two different ways: 1) Standard SSRP as currently designed, and 2) Flexible SSRP, where teachers choose which lessons to adopt in their classrooms. We will evaluate the SSRP Program using a randomized control trial.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Beg, Sabrin et al. 2020. "Targeted Teaching to Improve Learning in Secondary School." AEA RCT Registry. January 05. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.4138-1.1
Sponsors & Partners

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
The “Utkarsh” or SSRP intervention is a government-led remedial and grade-level program for 9th grade students , and focuses on 4 subjects: Odia, English, Math and Science. The program consists of three phases, each targeting a different “learning level”, designed to bring the lowest level learners to grade level and improve the grade-level knowledge of all students within a single school year. The first phase, the Foundation Camp (FC), targets the weakest students, those with a 3rd grade or lower learning level, and builds their foundational skills. The second phase, the Supported Learning Phase (SLP), adds medium-level students, or those with learning level at approximately 5th grade, and develops applications of foundational knowledge. The final phase, Consolidation Camp (CC), includes the entire class and focuses on grade-level material in preparation for the transition to 10th grade and the Class 10 board exams. These sessions operate within the typical school day with existing teachers.

We evaluate two models of the SSRP intervention, the Standard SSRP and the Flexible SSRP.
The Standard SSRP includes a fixed curriculum for each of learning phases. Teachers are provided materials for the SSRP lessons during the training and implement the program’s topics and lesson plans according to the pre-specified schedule. The Flexible SSRP differs from the standard version by offering more autonomy to teachers to adapt topics and/or timelines according to the needs of their students. Specifically, in the second and longest phase of the program, the Supported Learning Phase (SLP), teachers can choose which SSRP lessons to implement and in which order. This is facilitated through the use of a worksheet which tracks the lessons that teachers choose to implement. The other two phases of the program (FC and CC) are implemented as usual.
Intervention (Hidden)
Intervention Start Date
2019-08-01
Intervention End Date
2019-12-21

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
1. Student test scores
2. Attendance by students, teachers, and headmasters
3. Program compliance and fidelity (comparing between treatment arms)

See PAP for details.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
See PAP for a full list of secondary outcomes.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We will randomly select 300 schools from two districts of Odisha and randomly assign 200 of them to receive the SSRP (“treatment” schools, split into 100 Standard and 100 Flexible SSRP schools) and the other 100 to be control schools. The Odisha government will implement the SSRP treatments in treatment schools. We will conduct a set of baseline exams and surveys in all schools in June 2019 and endline exams and surveys in all schools in December 2019-January 2020. In addition to baseline and endline surveys, we will also conduct a monitoring visit to schools where we will collect information on classroom procedures, child attendance and engagement, teacher attendance and feedback.

Monitoring visits: We will visit all the schools once during the study. During the monitoring visits we will observe the third class period of the school and document certain aspects of a regular day in the schools, such as teaching practices, teacher feedback where we will capture the overall impression of the classroom activities to gain information related to teaching style, problem solving methods and communication feedback; and what activities the students are engaged in. We will also survey the teachers teaching the SSRP lessons in treatment schools, teachers teaching regular classes in Math, English, Science, and Odia for control schools, and the headmasters, in each school to measure teaching practices more generally.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Computer based
Randomization Unit
School
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
300 schools
Sample size: planned number of observations
6000 students (20 students per school) 1200 teachers (4 teachers per school) 300 headmaster (1 headmaster per school)
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
1. Standard SSRP - 100 schools
2. Flexible SSRP - 100 schools
3. Control - 100 schools
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Our primary outcome is student performance on the four program subjects. Assuming a conservative estimate of 30 percent attrition and a 0.4 increase in R-squared with the inclusion of baseline test scores, we estimate that our minimum detectable effect (MDE) is 0.17 standard deviations for Science and Odia and 0.18 standard deviations for Math and English. This is based on controlling for all available baseline scores when analyzing effects on endline test scores. In sum, we are adequately powered to detect meaningful differences in test scores between study arms – both between each of the treatment arms and the control arm, as well as comparing the treatment arms with one another.
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Institute of Financial Management and Research
IRB Approval Date
2019-12-04
IRB Approval Number
N/A
Analysis Plan

Analysis Plan Documents

Pre-Analysis Plan 2019-12-20

MD5: 1008d736cb543db78411f9d420ff6185

SHA1: 9eba803185c1f256525e6051e5712a1ed36339d0

Uploaded At: December 20, 2019

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
Yes
Intervention Completion Date
February 15, 2019, 12:00 +00:00
Data Collection Complete
Yes
Data Collection Completion Date
November 30, 2021, 12:00 +00:00
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization)
300
Was attrition correlated with treatment status?
No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations
5,756 students
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms
100 schools control, 100 schools Standard Utkarsh, 100 schools Flexible Utkarsh
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
No
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials