Description: In this study, we aim to experimentally evaluate the role of an information tool in enabling school leadership to improve management practices. We use MISchool for the study, a management information tool designed and developed by the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan to enable school leadership to improve operations and personnel management in low-cost and under-resourced settings. The study is in progress and will be rolled out to 3,600 low-cost private schools in 3 districts of Punjab - Multan, Lahore and Rawalpindi.
MISchool: School Management System
Citation: Khwaja, Qureshi and Gulzari. 2019. “MISchool: School Management System”.
Asim Khwaja
Zainab Qureshi
Roohullah Gulzari
Study Design and Findings
Prior work as part of the LEAPS portfolio has identified that low-cost private schools primarily use manual record-keeping practices for data such as fees, enrollment, attendance, and grades. These manual practices are costly, time-consuming and error-prone. To provide schools with an alterative, we developed the MISchool platform in conjunction with the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan, an application designed to allow schools to easily collect, store, and analyze data from a variety of sources. The tool is tailored to the operating environment of low-cost schools, including through affordable pricing and maintaining functionality in offline environments.
MISchool entered the market in six districts of Punjab in August 2019, successfully reaching over 300 schools in six months. Going forward, we have designed a randomized control trial to investigate various strategies for maximizing adoption of the tool. The existing academic literature discusses multiple barriers to new product adoption, including inability to discern product value prior to purchase (experience goods), and inability to understand or successfully utilize data generated by the product. To examine the impact of alleviating these barriers, our evaluation will use a 2x2 treatment design with three main treatments:
Treatment 1: Simple Information
All schools in our treatment group will be notified of the MISchool platform and receive some basic materials describing the platform.
Treatment 2: Experience Provision
Schools in this group will be offered a free trial period and free data entry to get the schools started on the platform. To the degree that MISchool is an experience good, providing experience at little-to-no cost to schools may enable them to realize the potential productivity gains of taking it up.
Treatment 3: Complementary Services:
Schools in this group will have access to the same tools as all other schools, but will additionally receive access to advisory and consulting services through providing them with analytics based on their data along with a list of resources and/or recommendations for improvement. These advisory services are intended to help school owners interpret the information provided by MISchool and utilize it for improving management practices.
Study Resources
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MISchool evaluation design