Ongoing Work: Education Support Services

Summary: We theorize that knowledge constraints or matching failures may limit the adoption of innovative products by low-cost private schools, even for those committed to improving student learning outcomes. We study the impact of providing private schools with access to education support services (ESS) products such as curricular development, school assessments, and teacher training; and investigate whether the adoption of these products can improve student learning outcomes. We see significant heterogeneity in results depending on the manner in which we outreach to schools, finding that involving teachers in the ESS process results in particularly enhanced take-up of educational products and the greatest improvements in school performance.

Principal Investigators

 

Tahir Andrabi

 

Jishnu Das

 

Asim Khwaja

 

Study Design and Research Questions

In Pakistan, despite rapid growth in the number of low-cost private schools, these schools often fail to make investments in products that can improve the quality of student learning outcomes. Past LEAPS research has shown that even when schools invest in “hard” infrastructure such as rooms, desks, and other physical infrastructure; they do not invest in “soft” infrastructure that may improve learning, such as textbooks and teacher training. Using a randomized control trial involving 815 schools, we aim to evaluate whether connecting private schools with providers of education support services (ESS) products can lead to increased investment in educational goods and improved school performance. We invite treatment schools to educational ‘melas’ (trade fairs) where providers of ESS goods were connected with representatives from schools in the low-cost private-school sector to showcase their products. We subsequently evaluated adoption rates of educational goods among attending schools, and investigated the extent of improvements in school-level outcomes.

Our main research questions include:

  1. What factors limit the adoption of educational products by private schools? - We seek to evaluate whether there are information barriers, knowledge constraints, or market-level matching failures that prevent schools that are otherwise dedicated to improving learning outcomes from investing in educational materials. Schools may be unaware of how to invest in educational products, or producers of these products may not believe that low-cost private schools are interested in acquiring their goods.

  2. Can educational ‘melas’ facilitate the creation of a market for educational products and enable increased adoption of educational products? - We organize trade fairs to connect providers of educational products with schools, and look to analyze whether such events can facilitate increased school investment in ESS materials.

  3. Do schools that acquire educational products at a mela demonstrate improved learning and financial outcomes? - We evaluate whether schools that acquire ESS products show improved financial success, student learning performance, or reduced closure.

  4. How can we best incentivize mela attendance and product acquisition for schools that attend melas? - We perform sub-experiments to evaluate whether involving school teachers or parents in the mela outreach process leads to heterogeneity in the impacts of intervention.