Layering Technology to Boost Impact: Can Phone Calls Boost the Effectiveness of TV-based instruction?

To minimize the loss of school days, the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) has started broadcasting pre-recorded classes through a designated TV channel (Sangsad TV) from 29 March 2020 for secondary students (grades 6-10). The program titled ‘My school at home’ will run each day from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm broadcasting classes on different subjects for each grade. We plan to assess impact of two treatment groups where Treatment 1 involves nudging of parents and students via weekly SMS message and phones call to watch TV lessons. Treatment 2 also engages students directly through quizzes and incentives beside nudging.

Treatment group 1: Parents receive weekly text message and phone call as reminder for their children to participate in the TV broadcasts. Students receive weekly phone calls as reminder of the weekly TV broadcasts.
Treatment group 2: Beside text messages and phone calls to parents and only phone calls to students as reminder, students will also participate in weekly quizzes covering some of the broadcast content. Based on the student’s performance, student's parent will receive a phone top-up of BDT 100 and student will receive a certificate from the Secondary Education Development Program. When school reopens, Secondary Education Development Program will also produce a documentary where best performing students will be invited to participate.

Because surveying households at baseline to assess engagement is itself a form of nudge treatment, we propose two control groups. One, the “basic control group,” will receive a baseline call (where we will gather basic covariates) and participate in the endline assessment. The other, a “pure control group,” will not participate in the baseline, but will only be assessed at the endline, relying on random assignment for comparability.

2020-06-15

2020-08-15

1. Self-reported hours of viewing/studying at the student level.
2. Student performance in a short quiz at endline on the broadcasted materials.

1. Students will be asked about the time spent watching the TV broadcasts and studying/practicing the broadcast materials later at home.
2. Students will participate in a short quiz of 8-10 questions at the endline. Total correct answers will provide the students' performance.

Students' motivation levels and satisfaction with the TV lessons.

Our questionnaire includes a set of questions on motivation levels and satisfaction with the TV lessons. We will use these questions to indicate how motivated and satisfied students are with the TV lessons.

At first, we will administer a pre-baseline of randomly selected 10,000-15,000 grade 9 students from Dhaka and Mymensingh division, from the list of stipend recipient from the government to identify students who have access to the broadcasting channel "Sangshad TV". From them, we will randomly select 1,500 students for the intervention dividing the students equally into 3 groups: 1 control and 2 treatment groups. We will also administer a baseline survey of randomly selected 500 students from the students who do not have access to "Sangshad TV".

For "pure control group", we will randomly select 500 grade 9 students from Dhaka and Mymensingh division, from the remaining stipend recipients from the government (excluding only the students who have already participated in the pre-baseline).

Randomization done in office by a computer using Stata.

Randomization is done at the student level.

No

None

2,000 students.

500 students per group (2 treatment groups, 1 control group and 1 pure control group).

0.2 SD of weekly quiz score.