AEA RC T Registr y

The American Economic Association's registry for randomized controlled trials

Educate Girls is an NGO based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. A large part of its mission is to further educational opportunities and outcomes for girls. In light of this, they have arranged for supplemental school instruction for children in grades 3 through 5 in the state of Rajasthan, India, called Community Learning Teams.

The Creative Learning and Teaching (CLT) program works as follows. At the beginning of the academic year, the organization recruits and trains members of the CLT in each village. Initially, these individuals subject students to tests in three subjects: (1) English, (2) Hindi, and (3) mathematics. Based upon the results of these tests (which are scored on a 1-5 scale), pupils receive targeted, regular instruction based upon their ability level. At the end of the year, all students take a final test. Past results suggest that test scores increase substantially throughout a given school year for students at all levels of the ability distribution.

In order to assess the effectiveness of the CLT program, we randomly chose 100 villages in Jalore district. These villages were then placed into treatment and control groups via stratified random sampling. Schools in the 50 treatment villages received the CLT program, while those in the 50 control villages did not. We intend to use the randomized design to assess the program's impact on a variety of outcomes, including test scores, school attendance, and enrollment in subsequent years.