Impact of online computer assisted learning on education: Experimental evidence from economically vulnerable areas of China

There is growing interest by both educators and policymakers in helping underperforming students catch up using computer assisted learning (CAL). While CAL interventions have been shown to be effective internationally and elsewhere in China, these have been mostly offline CAL programs that are difficult and costly to implement. An online CAL (OCAL) may be able to bypass many of offline CAL's implementation problems and enhance the remedial tutoring experience. The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of an OCAL intervention on the academic and non-academic performance of students and to explore the mechanism behind OCAL's impact. According to the findings, OCAL improved overall English scores of students in the treatment group relative to the control group by 0.48 standard deviations. This impact is large when compared with offline CAL programs previously evaluated in rural China. We found that OCAL also led to a positive change in the attitudes of students towards English learning and student aspirations for their future education level. We found three possible explanations for OCAL's impact. We believe that online features that enhance the interest-oriented stimulation of the software is the main source of improvement among students. Cost-effectiveness analysis showed that the OCAL program is more cost-effective than traditional offline CAL, which is suitable for policymakers as it indicates high potential for OCAL program expansion.