IntroductionRates of primary school enrolment have improved in India, but levels of learning achievement remain low. In the Support To Rural India's Public Education System (STRIPES) trial, a para-instructor intervention improved numeracy and literacy levels in Telangana, India (2008-10). The STRIPES2 trial was designed to assess whether a similar intervention in a younger cohort of children would have similar effects in Satna and Maihar districts of Madhya Pradesh, India, and be cost-effective.MethodsIn this Madhya Pradesh cluster-randomized controlled trial, 196 villages (clusters) were randomized to receive either a health (CHAMPION2: community health promotion and medical provision and impact on neonates) or education (STRIPES2) intervention. Villages receiving the health intervention were controls for the education intervention and vice versa. For children newly enrolled in primary school, the STRIPES2 intervention comprised before/after-school classes (2 hours per day, 6 days a week) given by trained para-instructors from the local community, frequent monitoring, and engagement with caregivers to motivate children, delivered by the Pratham Education Foundation. STRIPES2 activities had to be suspended twice for around ten and a half months, and some components of the intervention modified due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The period of the trial was extended with the primary outcome (a composite literacy and numeracy score of Early Grade Reading and Mathematics Assessments) assessed around 30 months after classes started.ResultsComposite test scores were significantly higher in the intervention arm (98 villages; 3054 children) than in the control arm (98 villages; 3275 children) at the end of the trial. The mean difference on a percentage point scale was 14.17; 95% CI 11.36 to 16.97; p < 0.001, equating to a 0.58 (95% CI 0.47 to 0.71) standard deviation difference. The cost per child per 0.1 SD increase in composite test score was INR 2476 (US$33.5).ConclusionDespite COVID-19 interruptions and disruptions, STRIPES2 resulted in a major improvement in children's literacy and numeracy. However, the cost of achieving such benefits was substantial.

Colleges can send signals about their quality by adopting new, more alluring names. We study how this affects college choice and labor market performance of college graduates. Administrative data show name-changing colleges enroll higher-aptitude students, with larger effects for alluring-but-misleading name changes and among students with less information. A large resume audit study suggests a small premium for new college names in most jobs, and a significant penalty in lower-status jobs. We characterize student and employer beliefs using web-scraped text, surveys, and other data. Our study shows signals designed to change beliefs can have real, lasting impacts on market outcomes.

Background India has made steady progress in improving rates of primary school enrolment but levels of learning achievement remain low. The Support To Rural India’s Public Education System (STRIPES) trial provided evidence that an after-school para-teacher intervention improved numeracy and literacy levels in Telangana, India. The STRIPES2 trial investigates whether such an intervention will have a similar effect on the literacy and numeracy of primary school age children in the Satna District of Madhya Pradesh, India. Methods/design The STRIPES2 trial forms one part of a cluster-randomised controlled trial with villages (clusters) randomised to receive either a health (CHAMPION2) or education (STRIPES2) intervention. Building on the design of the earlier CHAMPION/STRIPES trial, villages receiving the health intervention are controls for the education intervention and vice versa. The primary outcome is a combined literacy and numeracy score. Secondary outcomes include separate scores for literacy and numeracy; caregivers’ engagement with child’s learning; expenditure on education; enrolment in school; caregiver’s report of school attendance and the cost effectiveness of the intervention. Over 7000 primary school age children have been recruited and randomised in STRIPES2. Discussion This update to the published trial protocol gives a detailed plan for the statistical analysis of the STRIPES 2 trial. Trial registration Registry of India: CTRI/2019/05/019296. Registered on 23 May 2019. http://www.ctri.nic.in/Clinicaltrials/pdf_generate.php?trialid=31198&EncHid=&modid=&compid=%27,%2731198det%27

Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We use computational tools to characterize representation in children's books widely read in homes, classrooms, and libraries over the past century and describe economic forces that may contribute to these patterns. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data. We apply these tools, alongside text analysis methods, to measure skin color, race, gender, and age in the content of these books, documenting what has changed and what has endured over time. We find underrepresentation of Black and Latinx people in the most influential books, relative to their population shares, though representation of Black individuals increases over time. Females are also increasingly present but appear less often in text than in images, suggesting greater symbolic inclusion in pictures than substantive inclusion in stories. Characters in these influential books have lighter average skin color than in other books, even after conditioning on race, and children are depicted with lighter skin color than adults on average. We present empirical analysis of related economic behavior to better understand the representation we find in these books. On the demand side, we show that people consume books that center their own identities and that the types of children's books purchased correlate with local political beliefs. On the supply side, we document higher prices for books that center nondominant social identities and fewer copies of these books in libraries that serve predominantly White communities.

In settings of extreme poverty, how do demand and supply combine to produce child learning? In rural Gambia, caregivers with high aspirations for their children's future, measured before children start school, invest substantially more than others in children’s education. Despite this, essentially no children are literate or numerate three years later. When villages receive a highly impactful, teacher-focused supply-side intervention, however, children of high-aspirations caregivers are 25 percent more likely to achieve literacy and numeracy than others in the same village. We estimate patterns of substitutability and complementarity between demand and supply in generating learning that change with skill difficulty.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

The manner in which gender is portrayed in materials used to teach children conveys messages about people’s roles in society. In this paper, we measure the gendered depiction of central domains of social life in 100 years of highly influential children’s books. We make two main contributions: (1) we find that the portrayal of gender in these books reproduces traditional gender norms in society, and (2) we publish StoryWords 1.0, the first word embeddings trained on such a large body of children’s literature. We find that, relative to males, females are more likely to be represented in relation to their appearance than in relation to their competence; second, they are more likely to be represented in relation to their role in the family than their role in business. Finally, we find that non-binary or gender-fluid individuals are rarely mentioned. Our analysis advances understanding of the different messages contained in content commonly used to teach children, with immediate applications for practice, policy, and research.

In many societies, beliefs about differential intellectual ability by gender persist across generations. These societal beliefs can contribute to individual belief formation and thus lead to persistent gender inequality across multiple dimensions. We show evidence of intergenerational transmission of gender norms through peers and how this affects gender gaps in learning. We use nationally representative data from China and the random assignment of children to middle-school classrooms to estimate the effect of being assigned a peer group with a high proportion of parents who believe that boys are innately better than girls at learning mathematics. We find this increases a child’s likelihood of holding the belief, with greater effects from peers of the same gender. It also affects the child’s demonstrated mathematics ability, generating gains for boys and losses for girls. Our findings highlight how the informational environment in which children grow up can shape their beliefs and academic ability.

Aspirations shape important future-oriented behaviors, including educational investment. Higher family aspirations for children predict better educational outcomes in multiple developing countries. Unfortunately, aspirations sometimes outstrip people’s ability to pursue them. We study the relationship between family aspirations for children and later child educational outcomes in an extremely poor context. We observe caregivers’ educational and career aspirations for thousands of rural Gambian children about to begin schooling. While higher aspirations predict subsequent educational investment and, three years later, better child performance on reading/math tests, these gains are small in terms of skills learned, and high-aspirations children remain far from achieving literacy/numeracy. In contrast, a bundled supply-side intervention generated large literacy/numeracy gains in these areas. Since unobserved correlates of aspirations and educational outcomes likely bias our estimates upwards, the true aspirationslearning relationship may be even smaller. We conclude higher aspirations alone are insufficient to achieve literacy/numeracy in this, and perhaps similar contexts. ∗Eble: Teachers College, Columbia University, eble@tc.columbia.edu. Escueta: Teachers College, Columbia University, mme17@tc.columbia.edu. We are grateful to the collaborators on the SCORE Trial Chris Frost, Alpha Camara, Baboucarr Bouy, Momodou Bah, Maitri Sivaraman, Pei-Tseng Jenny Hsieh, Chitra Jayanty, Tony Brady, Piotr Gawron, Stijn Vansteelandt, Peter Boone, and Diana Elbourne as well as our research team in the Gambia, particularly Alpha Camara and Lamin Janneh; see Eble et al. (2021). We received helpful input from Naureen Karachiwalla, Kimi Chan, Beezer Cheble, Josh Merfeld, Kate Orkin, Phillip Ross, and seminar audiences at the Columbia Committee on the Economics of Education, the Columbia Population Research Center, and the New York Nanodev conference. Eble acknowledges support from the National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Children routinely benefit from being assigned a teacher who shares an identity with them, such as gender or ethnicity. We study how student beliefs impact teacher-student gender match effects, and how this varies across subjects with different societal beliefs about differential ability by gender. A simple model of belief formation yields two predictions: one, that match effects will be larger for students who believe they are of low ability, and two, that they will be greater in subjects where societal beliefs tell the child they are of low ability because of their membership in a given group, such as gender or race. We test these using data from Chinese middle schools, exploiting random assignment of students to teachers. In China, many people believe boys are innately better than girls at math. We find that being assigned a female math teacher helps low-perceived-ability girls and slightly harms low-perceived-ability boys, with no effects for other children. In English and Chinese – subjects where societal beliefs do not suggest boys are superior to girls – the effects of teacher-student gender match on low perceived ability girls diminish or disappear. This yields policy implications for the assignment of teachers to students.

Children in many extremely poor, remote regions are growing up illiterate and innumerate despite high reported school enrollment ratios. Possible explanations for such poor outcomes include demand – for example, low perceived returns to education compared to opportunity cost; and supply – poor state provision and inability of parents to coordinate and finance better schooling. We conducted a cluster-randomized trial in rural Guinea Bissau to understand the effectiveness and cost of concerted supply-based interventions in such contexts. Our intervention created simple schools offering four years of education to primary-school aged children in lieu of the government. At endline, children receiving the intervention scored 58.1 percentage points better than controls on early grade reading and math tests, demonstrating that the intervention taught children to read and perform basic arithmetic, from a counterfactual condition of very high illiteracy. Our results provide evidence that particularly needy areas may require more concerted, dramatic interventions in education than those usually considered, but that such interventions hold great potential for increasing education levels among the world’s poorest people. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Despite large schooling and learning gains in many developing countries, children in highly deprived areas are often unlikely to achieve even basic literacy and numeracy. We study how much of this problem can be resolved using a multi-pronged intervention combining three interventions known to be separately effective. We conducted a cluster-randomized trial in The Gambia evaluating a literacy and numeracy intervention designed for primary-aged children in remote parts of poor countries. The intervention combines para teachers delivering after-school supplementary classes, scripted lesson plans, and frequent monitoring focusing on improving teacher practice (coaching). A similar intervention previously demonstrated large learning gains in rural India. After three academic years, Gambian children allocated to the intervention scored 46 percentage points (3.2 SD) better on a combined literacy and numeracy test than control children. Our results demonstrate that, in this type of area, aggressive interventions can yield far greater learning gains than previously shown.

Nearly all governments provide primary schooling, but surprisingly little is known about how changes to the duration of primary school affect educational attainment and performance in the labor market. We study a Chinese policy which extended the duration of primary school from five years to six but did not change the curriculum. We exploit its gradual rollout over space and time to generate causal estimates of its impact on educational attainment and subsequent labor market outcomes. We find that the policy has small, largely positive effects on post-primary educational attainment, and raises average monthly income by 2.6%. The policy is progressive, generating higher returns (5–8%) among both women and the least educated. We estimate the policy has already reallocated 450 million years of labor from work to schooling and we generate cost-benefit estimates to quantify this tradeoff, highlighting the large public finance implications of this policy decision.

We study the transmission of gender bias from adults to children and how this contributes to the gender gap in mathematics. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the proportion of a child’s middle school classmates whose parents believe boys are better than girls at learning mathematics. An increase in exposure to peers whose parents report this belief increases a child’s likelihood of believing it, with similar effects for boys and girls and greater transmission from peers of the same gender. This exposure affects children’s perceived difficulty of math, aspirations, and academic performance, generating gains for boys and losses for girls. ∗Eble (corresponding author): Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis, Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 W 120th St, New York, NY 10027. Phone: 212-678-7478. Email: eble@tc.columbia.edu Hu: School of Economics and Management, University of Science and Technology Beijing. Email: feng3hu@gmail.com. Author names are shown alphabetically; both authors contributed equally to this research. We are grateful to Peter Bergman, Sarah Cohodes, Jishnu Das, Kiki Pop-Eleches, Randy Reback, Jonah Rockoff, Judy Scott-Clayton, and Miguel Urquiola for helpful comments.

This paper studies the power of role models in changing beliefs, behavior, and outcomes for children who are struggling in school and who face negative stereotypes. We exploit random assignment of Chinese middle school students to classrooms to estimate how being assigned a female math teacher affects low performing girls. In our data, there is widespread belief that men are more able to learn mathematics than women. We find that teacher-student gender match improves math test scores by 0.45 SD for low performing girls, increases their beliefs in the ability of women to learn mathematics, reduces their perception of the difficulty of learning math, and increases their investment in math-related human capital. These results are consistent with the main predictions of a model of aspirations and aspirations failure. They also provide direct empirical evidence for a specific mechanism, the power of role models in shaping beliefs, driving the common finding that a same-gendered teacher improves girls’ performance. ⇤Eble: Teachers College, Columbia University. Email: eble@tc.columbia.edu Hu: School of Economics and Management, University of Science and Technology Beijing feng3hu@gmail.com. The authors are grateful to John Friedman, Asim Khwaja, and Ilyana Kuziemko for generous feedback.