AEA Home
AEA

Document Request

You have requested the following article:
Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India
Karthik Muralidharan, Abhijeet Singh, and Alejandro J. Ganimian
American Economic Review. Apr 2019, Vol. 109, No. 4: Pages 1426-1460

Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India†

Karthik Muralidharan1, Abhijeet Singh2 and Alejandro J. Ganimian3

1Department of Economics, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla CA, NBER, and J-PAL (email: )

2Department of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics, Sveavagen 65, Stockholm, Sweden (email: )

3NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, 246 Greene Street, New York, NY (email: )

Abstract

We study the impact of a personalized technology-aided after-school instruction program in middle-school grades in urban India using a lottery that provided winners with free access to the program. Lottery winners scored 0.37 σ higher in math and 0.23 σ higher in Hindi over just a 4.5-month period. IV estimates suggest that attending the program for 90 days would increase math and Hindi test scores by 0.6 σ and 0.39 σ respectively. We find similar absolute test score gains for all students, but much greater relative gains for academically-weaker students. Our results suggest that well-designed, technology-aided instruction programs can sharply improve productivity in delivering education. (JEL I21, I26, I28, J24, O15)