Digital Tutoring Could Deliver a Tailored Education for Every Child

In India, despite primary school enrollment rates over 95 percent, over half of students in the 5th grade cannot read at a 2nd grade level. A lagging student will likely absorb little material when she is in a classroom covering material more advanced than her knowledge and skill. This problem is exacerbated when students automatically advance to higher grades without first acquiring foundational knowledge.

In recent years, several pilot educational programs in Southeast Asia and Africa have implemented a “Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL)” approach, which caters to the actual learning levels of students and focuses on skill acquisition rather than curriculum completion. This approach involves providing additional teachers to instruct lagging students on basic competencies, regularly monitoring student progress, and conducting after-school instruction camps to facilitate more tailored teaching. While TaLR based programs appear promising in theory, scaling issues such as hiring additional teachers and training existing teachers can be a major impediment. Further, the effectiveness of TaLR approaches at higher grade levels remains unclear.

Technology-aided instruction (TAI) programs that customize content to the individual student may help remedy differences in student learning with less burden on instructors and improve overall educational outcomes for post-primary students. From September 2015 to February 2016, Karthik Muralidharan, Abhijeet Singh, Alejandro Ganimian evaluated the educational efficacy of a personalized TAI program called Mindspark on middle school students in Delhi, India. The Mindspark centers provided 619 middle school students, selected by lottery, 90-minute after-school learning sessions 6 days every week. Each session contained 45 minutes of individual self-driven learning via the Mindspark program and 45 minutes of group-based instructions led by a teaching assistant.

The authors of the study found that the TAI program had a statistically significant positive effect on students. They estimate that attending the program for 90 days would increase math and Hindi test scores by 0.6 standard deviations and 0.39 standard deviations, respectively. The study found similar test score gains for all students, and academically-weaker students had the greatest relative gains.

The researchers also found Mindspark centers to be cost-effective both in terms of productivity per dollar and per unit of time. The test score increase in the treatment group was over 100 percent greater than that in the control group and was achieved at a lower cost per student than in the public school system. The Mindspark centers could yield, in one-tenth of the time, effect sizes comparable to the largest seen to date in experimental studies on education in developing countries. While these estimates reflect the impact of a “blended learning” program, the authors write they are most likely attributable to the technology-aided instruction component rather than after-school instructional time or group-based tutoring.

These findings suggest that personalizing instruction with technology can provide a promising option for scaling up the “Teaching at the Right Level” approach at all levels of schooling without increasing the workload on teachers. However, limitations in the ability and willingness of the poor to pay for such programs mean that government-led initiatives may be essential in delivering on this promise. The paper recommends further research in several remaining questions: can the program scale up to larger populations efficiently? Are the TAI programs supplements or substitutes to regular coursework? And, critically, what role will a teacher play when education centers on lessons delivered by a computer?

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Article source: Muralidharan, Karthik, Abhijeet Singh, and Alejandro J. Ganimian. “Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India.” The American Economic Review 109, no. 4 (04, 2019): 1426-1460.

Featured photo illustration, created by: Mark Sheppard.