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WDR 2018

What a new preschool study tells us about early child education – and about impact evaluation

David Evans's picture
When I talk to people about impact evaluation results, I often get two reactions:
  1. Sure, that intervention delivered great results in a well-managed pilot. But it doesn’t tell us anything about whether it would work at a larger scale. 
  2. Does this result really surprise you? (With both positive results and null results, I often hear, Didn’t we already know that intuitively?)

A recent paper – “Cognitive science in the field: A preschool intervention durably enhances intuitive but not formal mathematics” – by Dillon et al., provides answers to both of these, as well as giving new insights into the design of effective early child education.

Teacher Coaching: What We Know

David Evans's picture
“Teacher coaching has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional models of professional development.” In Kraft, Blazar, and Hogan’s newly updated review “The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence,” they highlight that reviews of the literature on teacher professional development (i.e., training teachers who are already on the job) highlight a few promising characteristics of effect

Are good school principals born or can they be made?

David Evans's picture
Also available in: Portuguese | Arabic

Good principals can make a big difference
“It is widely believed that a good principal is the key to a successful school.” So say Branch, Hanushek, and Rivkin in their study of school principals on learning productivity. But how do you measure this? Using a database from Texas in the United States, they employ a value-added approach analogous to that used to measure performance among teachers. They control for basic information on student backgrounds (gender, ethnicity, and an indicator of poverty) as well as student test scores from the previous year. Then they ask, What happens to student learning when a school changes principals? They find that increasing principal quality by one standard deviation increases student learning by 0.11 standard deviations. Even after additional adjustments, their most conservative estimates show that “a 1-standard-deviation increase in principal quality translates into roughly 0.05 standard deviations in average student achievement gains, or nearly two months of additional learning.”

Notably, while improving teacher effectiveness affects the average performance of all of the students in his class, improving principal effectiveness affects average performance of the entire school, so the potential gains are high.

Should we pay kids to read?

David Evans's picture
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A few weeks ago, my wife and I were reading aloud Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s newest book, a short volume entitled Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. The eponymous fifteen suggestions are Adichie’s advice to her friend on how to raise her daughter – Chizalum – as a feminist. Here’s the fifth suggestion: “Teach Chizalum to read. Teach her to love books. The best way is by casual example. If she sees you reading, she will understand that reading is valuable.” This all seems sensible. Now, skip down to the end: “If all else fails, pay her to read. Reward her. I know this remarkable Nigerian woman, Angela, a single mother who was raising her child in the United States; her child did not take to reading so she decided to pay her five cents a page. An expensive endeavor, she later jokes, but a worthy investment.” In the margin, I scribbled, “Look at lit on this.”
 

 

Scaling Up Effective Programs – Kenya and Liberia Edition

David Evans's picture
Over the last decade, both Kenya and Liberia have sought to scale up successful pilot programs that help children to learn to read. Even as more and more impact evaluations are of programs at scale, pilots still constitute a significant portion of what we test. That’s with good reason: Governments wisely seek to pilot and test programs before expending valuable resources in implementing a program across the country.

What’s new in education research? Impact evaluations and measurement – March round-up

David Evans's picture



Here is a curated round-up of recent research on education in low- and middle-income countries, with a few findings from high-income countries that I found relevant. All are from the last few months, since my last round-up.

If I’m missing recent articles that you’ve found useful, please add them in the comments!

Technoskeptics pay heed: A computer-assisted learning program that delivers learning results

David Evans's picture
Some years ago, a government I was working with really wanted to increase the data they had on their own education system. They didn’t have great data on student attendance or teacher attendance, much less on tardiness or instruction time. They designed an information management system with swipe cards for every student and teacher to use going in and out of classrooms, all of which would feed wirelessly into the district office, allowing real-time interventions to improve education. It sounded amazing! And it fell apart before it ever began.