Measuring the impact of “hybrid” digital learning on children in rural Indian communities.

Pratham, the implementation partner, has been developing a ’Hybrid’ program targeted at children in grades 5-8 where high-quality digital content relating to Math, English, and Science is made available on easily accessible devices and provided to groups of children in communities and supported by appropriate social support structures. This ’Hybrid’ model attempts to address the shortcomings of typical digital content, the traditional focus of learning in Indian schools, and lack of community engagement and ownership of learning.

The digital content has been developed, curated, and piloted by a central team at Pratham while their field teams are involved in setting up and implementing the program. Owing to COVID-19 some part of the implementation will happen through online and virtual meetings until the situation eases.

1. Pratham field staff has conducted activities to engage the target children and created groups of children previously. These groups will act as a unit and will complete the activities that are prescribed. These groups are formed based on the proximity of households. End-of-course (to be undertaken independently) allows children to understand their progress.

2. Once the groups are formed, Pratham field staff will identify volunteers from the community called 'coaches' of children who will serve as 'custodians' of the digital devices (here tablets). The custodians will be in possession of the tablets and only hand them over to children when they meet to complete the content. The children shall access the content either through the tablets or throughs apps on their parent’s or coach’s mobile devices.

3. The children are expected to meet a few times a week and work together on reviewing the content.

4. The volunteers or 'coaches' will be trained on how to facilitate the engagement of the groups and on implementing the course in the village. The role of the coach would be to introduce the course, register groups for courses, motivate groups to complete course and assessment. However, due to COVID-19, Pratham's Cluster Resource Leaders (CRLs) will provide mentoring support to the coaches via virtual meetings and/or phone calls. As coaches belong to the same village, movement within the village is possible.

5. During the course of the program, Pratham staff had planned to conduct periodic visits to villages and monitor the implementation. They had also planned to provide mentoring support to the coaches and along with them conduct periodic events in the community that will include assessments and showcasing of project work. Pratham staff will also encourage other adults to engage in the program by being a part of a committee that assesses the learning of children. However, during the lockdown period most of the activity will be online and the assessments will be conducted through assessment app by parents and coaches or the students.

6. Pratham staff will conduct regular check-ins with students during COVID-19 times via different modes of communication like SMS and Whatsapp etc.

2021-10-17

2023-03-31

Test scores in Maths, English, and Reading.

Outcome measures of interest are learning gains in foundational skills such as functional English and Maths (everyday math as well as school-like math) and vernacular reading. Well-tested and piloted assessments developed by ASER/Pratham and J-PAL (for other research projects) will be primarily used to measure these outcomes, with some adaption of appropriate standard international tools if required.

Confidence, Motivation to learn, and Collaboration.

Additionally, if feasible, there will also be an attempt to measure confidence, collaboration, and motivation to learn. We will also examine the presence of differential impact across gender, age, and initial ability.

The evaluation will test the combined effectiveness of the “social infrastructure”, group learning methodology and the “digital trigger” content in improving learning outcomes in English and Math. A further ‘bonus’ (if found to be feasible) may be testing of social-emotional skill development (confidence, creativity, motivation, etc.).

In consultation with our implementation partner Pratham, the research team has identified villages across the Dausa district in Rajasthan where they would like to evaluate the program being implemented through a Randomized Control Trial. This will be a two-year evaluation across 276 villages, with testing at baseline, after Year 1 and after Year 2 and some light-touch intervention monitoring. The 276 villages will be randomly assigned to:
- Control group (92 villages): No intervention;
- Treatment group 1 (92 villages): Full Hybrid model with remote support as detailed above (groups of children, digital devices and content, societal infrastructure comprised of coaches and assessment committees). Once the COVID-19 situation eases, the implementation to be switched to fully in-person form with regular visits by CRLs to the village and active village assessment committees.
- Treatment group 2 (92 villages): Hybrid model with the children’s groups but without societal infrastructure such as no community volunteers, assessment committees etc. The impact of the program will be measured by the difference in learning outcomes between the treatment and control groups. We plan to undertake baseline, midline and end-line assessments.

Randomization done in office by a computer (Stata).

Village

Yes

276

5,520 children (20 per village).

92 villages control, 92 villages T1, 92 villages T2.

Our sample size of two treatment groups of 92 villages and one control of 92 gives us a power of 80 percent to detect a difference in 0.21 standard deviation in test scores between any specific treatment.

Pre-Analysis Plan Hybrid Digital Learning Program