Supporting learning in and out of school: Experimental evidence from India

Targeted educational interventions for primary school children in low-income countries have led to substantial improvements in learning, but their impact varies considerably across studies, raising questions about how to sustain their effectiveness in different settings. In this paper, we study a novel primary education program that combines a conventional in-school targeted pedagogical intervention with an out-of-school study group initiative facilitated by the community. To identify the impact of the program and its components, we design a cross-cutting randomized experiment across 200 villages in Assam, India. Our results show that standalone implementation of either component has no significant effect on learning outcomes, but when the components are combined in the full program, they improve children’s test scores in mathematics and language by 0.11 and 0.09 standard deviations, respectively. Our results suggest that integrating in-school targeted instruction with community-based out-of-school activities can enhance program effectiveness by increasing students’ engagement and overall exposure to learning, at relatively low cost.