How to improve education outcomes most efficiently? A review of the evidence using a unified metric

Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education with limited resources. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. This paper provides the most recent and comprehensive review of the literature on effective education programs, with a novel emphasis on cost-effectiveness. We analyze the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions from over 200 impact evaluations across 52 countries. We use a unified measure — learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) — that combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard. The results identify programs and policies that can be up to an order of magnitude more cost-effective than business-as-usual approaches. Examples of some of the most cost-effective approaches include targeting instruction to students’ learning level rather than grade as well as structured pedagogy approaches. These results can enable policymakers to improve education outcomes substantially more efficiently.