Research
Working Papers
Can Schools Teach Innovation? Experimental Evidence from India (Manuscript coming soon)
Innovation plays a pivotal role in fostering economic growth, yet there is limited understanding of whether innovative abilities can be taught. I study a two-year after-school education program in India that provided 4,500 8th-grade students from disadvantaged backgrounds the opportunity to develop frugal innovations. Using a novel scale created with experienced inventors and a lab-in-the-field game, I find the program had a consistently positive impact on students' innovative abilities, with improvements of 0.24 and 0.12 standard deviations, respectively. The program enhanced students' higher-order skills, such as problem-solving and cognitive ability. While it did not have an overall effect on math and science outcomes, it generated heterogeneous impacts based on baseline math performance. Students with above-median baseline math scores improved in math by 0.18 standard deviations, while those below the median experienced a 0.12 standard deviation decline. Notably, students with below-median baseline math scores showed significant improvement in exploratory skills, while those above the median did not. These results suggest that targeted educational interventions can effectively nurture innovation skills, challenging the conventional wisdom that traditional academic subjects are the only pathways for developing advanced competencies. The findings offer insights for policymakers and educators seeking to cultivate problem-solving and creative thinking skills in developing economies, particularly for students who may not excel in conventional academic settings.
Partners - Inqui-Lab Foundation, Telangana Social Welfare Residential Educational Institutions Society, Telangana Tribal Welfare Residential Educational Society
Coverage - The World Bank's Development Impact Blog
Going All In: Simultaneously Breaking Down Barriers for Women in the STEM Workforce
(with Ashutosh Bhuradia)
This research aims to measure the impact of a program for women engineers in India, an 18-month STEM training initiative designed for first-generation women engineering students. Deployed nationwide by an education start-up, the program employs a holistic strategy to overcome multifaceted barriers faced by women in STEM fields. By fostering a women-only environment, providing online accessibility, and emphasizing self-directed learning, the initiative seeks to address cultural, institutional, and psychological challenges hindering women's success in STEM. We aim to evaluate the WE program's efficacy in enhancing participants' technical and higher-order skills, ultimately influencing their labor market outcomes. With an underrepresentation of women in STEM persisting globally, this research contributes valuable insights into designing targeted interventions for breaking down barriers and fostering inclusivity in STEM education and careers.
Funding Support: $75000 from the Digital Harbor Foundation
Scaling Up Personalized Adaptive Learning in India
(with Wendy Wong, Alex Eble, Emily Cupito, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, and Michael Kremer)
(Abstract Coming Soon)
Do Better Emotional Skills Lead To More Team Productivity?
This study explores emotional intelligence's impact on team dynamics in schools. Through a randomized intervention across 80 schools, it investigates how varying compositions of emotional perceptiveness within student teams affect individual and collective outcomes. Findings offer insights into optimal team formation strategies and the role of emotional competencies in collaborative environments.
Can phones be used for measuring foundational literacy and numeracy? Experimental evidence from India
Using a crossover randomized design with 1603 government primary school students in Uttar Pradesh, I report two key results about phone-based assessments (PBA) for measuring foundational literacy and numeracy skills. First, PBA is valid, reliable, and equivalent to currently prevalent in-person assessments (IPA). Second, in the specific case of literacy assessments, reliability on WhatsApp for sending literacy prompts is better than using students' school textbooks. Consider these results along with two other important possibilities - PBA are more cost-effective and operationally easy and they are better representative of the student population today due to accelerated penetration of phones and internet in the rural areas. These outcomes offer policymakers an additional assessment mode to measure students' learning outcomes for formative purposes. This could also potentially address the principal-agent problem that is currently prevalent and leads to huge distortion in the reporting of learning outcomes.
Read articles about this study: Ideas for India and Central Square Foundation:
Funded by: Central Square Foundation
Presentations: AEFP 2022, GEEZ Seminars 2022
Workshop: Economics and Education Students Colloquium, Teachers College, Columbia University
Awards: Teachers College - The Provost's Grant For Conference Attendance & Presentation, Education Policy and Social Analysis Department Research Grant AY21-22
No Gender Bias? Results from Experimental Research in India
Addressing gender disparities in education is a global priority, endorsed by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. A proposed strategy is to increase female teacher representation, assuming potential benefits for girls' education. To examine this assumption, I analyzed teacher grading practices in Andhra Pradesh, India, considering student gender and prior academic performance. Using a 3x3 randomized experiment design, teachers assessed student essays, unaware of the true authors, but informed of varying characteristics, including gender (female, male, none) and prior grades (high, low, none). Surprisingly, the results showed that, on average, girls received higher grades than boys. While not statistically significant, female teachers tended to assign lower scores to essays attributed to girls, challenging conventional wisdom. In summary, this study suggests that government teachers in Andhra Pradesh do not demonstrate gender bias in grading.
Partner: Directorate of School Education, Andhra Pradesh
Funding: Student Grant $10000 by Prof. Prashant Loyalka