Foundational skills

Foundational Skills at Scale in Zambia’s Public Schools

We study Zambia’s government-run foundational skills program in public primary schools. A randomized trial estimates its effects on literacy and numeracy, on the transfer of targeted skills to adjacent domains, and on later exam performance. Alongside it, 78 in-depth interviews with education personnel combine thematic coding with unsupervised machine learning to explore what drives teachers to change their instructional practices.

Andreas de Barros, Junita Henry, Theresa Lubozha, Jacqueline Mathenge

Foundational Skills at Scale in Zambia’s Public Schools

Targeting Foundational Skills at Scale: Skill Specificity and Transfer

Whether targeted foundational instruction yields broad, long-term human capital gains is central to education policy but largely …

Andreas de Barros, Theresa Lubozha

The Foundational Math Skills of Indian Children

We leverage data on learning for 101,084 public-school students in grades 4, 6, and 8 across 19 Indian states to diagnose their …

Andreas de Barros, Alejandro J. Ganimian

Building Back Better to Avert a Learning Catastrophe: Estimating Learning Loss from COVID-19 School Shutdowns in Africa and Facilitating Short-term and Long-term Learning Recovery

We model learning losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential for cost-effective strategies to build back better. Data from …

Noam Angrist, Andreas de Barros, Radhika Bhula, Shiraz Chakera, Chris Cummiskey, Joseph DeStefano, John Floretta, Michelle Kaffenberger, Benjamin Piper, Jonathan Stern