Effects of a Multi-Faceted Education Program on Enrollment, Learning and Gender Equity: Evidence from India

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals set a triple educational objective: improve access to, quality of, and gender equity in education. This paper documents the effectiveness of a multifaceted educational program, pursuing these three objectives simultaneously. Using an experiment in 229 schools in rural Rajasthan (India), the study measures the effects of the program on students’ school participation and academic performance over two years, while also examining heterogeneous impacts across gender and initial learning ability. It finds that the program increased student enrollment, with the largest effects among girls (7.2 percent in the first year, 12.8 percent in the second). There were large learning gains of 0.329 standard deviations (SDs) in the first year and 0.206 SDs at the end of the second year. The learning component of the intervention targeted both boys and girls – boys and girls benefited equally from the program in terms of test score gains.

Equity and Parity in Primary Education: A Study on Performance in Language and Mathematics Using Hierarchical Linear Models

“…Based on the above, educational innovations should be aimed not only at promoting excellence in education but also at improving equity and parity among students. That is, educators should seek to promote educational achievement and, at the same time, to reduce the social and gender gap among the school population [25,26]. Perhaps it is necessary to rethink the idea of curricular standardization, as in the search for systemic changes that achieve equitable quality education with equal opportunities for the entire educational community, it seems necessary to focus on addressing the gaps rather than on the results of achievement tests that assess educational success based on a standardized curriculum [18].…”

“…There is an even closer relationship between these factors than between performance and economic factors [24]. For that reason, parity constitutes, together with equity, one of the fundamental criteria currently used to assess the quality of the educational system, and both have been postulated as major criteria for educational intervention and evaluation [25,26].…”

Some Children Left Behind: Variation in the Effects of an Educational Intervention

“…The NULP bundles several complementary interventions, which we study as a combined whole. This is the most policy-relevant way to examine the program: Delavallade, Griffith, and Thornton (2021) point out that while the majority of programs actually implemented in developing countries involve a packaged bundle of education inputs, most evaluations study the effectiveness of a single intervention. 5 These packaged interventions show real promise, with RCTs sometimes finding effects as large as those found for the NULP (e.g., Gove et al 2017).…”