qadar Ahmed

I
Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. Some studies report changes in years of schooling; others report changes in learning. Standard deviations, the metric typically used to report learning gains, measure gains relative to a local distribution of test scores. This metric makes it hard to judge if the gain is worth the cost in absolute terms. This paper proposes using learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) — which combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard — as a new metric for reporting gains from education interventions. The paper applies LAYS to compare the effectiveness (and cost-effectiveness, where cost is available) of interventions from 150 impact evaluations across 46 countries. The results show that some of the most cost-effective programs deliver the equivalent of three additional years of high-quality schooling (that is, schooling at a quality comparable to the highest-performing education systems) for just $100 per child — compared with emotions using the New

Schools closed extensively during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although smaller in scale, school closures occur relatively frequently in other settings, such as teacher strikes and natural disasters. The cost of school closures is substantial, particularly for households of lower socioeconomic status, however, little evidence exists on how to mitigate these learning losses. This paper provides some of the first experimental evidence on strategies to minimize learning loss when schools close. We conduct a large-scale randomized trial testing two low-technology interventions – SMS messages and phone calls – with parents to support their child in Botswana. The combined treatment improves learning by 0.12 standard deviations, which translates to .89 standard deviations of learning per USD 100. These learning gains rank among the most cost-effective interventions to improve learning. We develop remote assessment innovations, which show robust learning outcomes. Our findings have immediate policy relevance and long-run implications for the role of technology and parents in education when schooling is disrupted, and, more generally, for cost-effective methods to improve learning at scale in low-resource settings.