Policy Seed Grant | 2005-2006

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Education Production and Peer Networks for Out-of-School Children in India

by Leigh Linden

This is a pilot project of a larger evaluation designed to investigate the education production function in the context of an informal community based model of instruction targeted at out-of-school children in India. The larger project, will involve a three part randomization that will allow distinguish the effects of student, teacher, classmate, and non-class peers on student achievement while also generally evaluating the effectiveness of the community based class model. The evaluation design comprises three randomizations. First, from 100 communities 600 will randomly be chosen for the intervention. In the treatment communities, out-of-school children who indicate an interest in the program will randomly be chosen as a subset to receive the treatment. To generate variation in the coverage of student peer networks, the fraction of out-of-school children that are treated in these communities will be varied. Finally, random assignment of students to classes and teachers to classes will allow measurement of the effects of teacher and classmate characteristics. The proposed pilot will comprise a test of the feasibility of recruiting sufficient children and potential teachers to implement the proposed randomizations by conducting a smaller version of the study in 10 communities with 400 children.