Working Papers
Can Schools Teach Innovation? Experimental Evidence from India (Working Paper)
Innovation fuels long-run economic growth, yet education systems in developing countries often overlook the skills required for it. This paper provides the first experimental evidence that students can learn core innovation-related skills. I conduct a large-scale clustered randomized controlled trial with 4,800 eighth-grade students in India, comparing a two-year school-based innovation training program to a control group with access to self-directed project opportunities. Because existing measures of innovation are scarce and rarely validated in low-income school settings, I develop a novel, multi-method toolkit that includes a strategic exploration task, expert-rated idea quality assessments, and a live funding competition. Treated students significantly outperformed controls across all three domains (0.10–0.24 SD) and secured 24 percentage points more external funding. The program also improved fluid intelligence and problem-solving, though these remained distinct from innovation outcomes. Heterogeneity analyses show complementary gains in innovation and math for students with above-median baseline scores (0.16–0.20 SD), and gains in higher-order skills but math declines (–0.14 SD) for those below the median. These patterns suggest that lower-performing students reallocated effort away from abstract math toward more applied, hands-on tasks where they experienced greater success. The results offer a proof of concept: innovation skills are malleable, and marginalized students can develop them—reframing assumptions about when and where valuable ideas can emerge.
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
Funding: The Weiss Fund, NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, Teachers College Grants
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: Digital Harbor Foundation
Scaling Up Personalized Adaptive Learning in India
(with Wendy Wong, Alex Eble, Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Michael Kremer, Emily Cupito, Sabareesh Ramachandran)
This research examines the implementation and impact of a Personalized Adaptive Learning (PAL) program across 480 schools in Andhra Pradesh, India. Working in partnership with the Government of Andhra Pradesh, our study investigates a large-scale educational technology initiative that began in October 2023 and will conclude in February 2026. While educational technologies show promise in controlled environments, their effectiveness when scaled through government systems remains understudied. This project bridges this critical research gap by combining rigorous impact evaluation with implementation science. Using advanced machine learning and econometric techniques, we analyze student-level data on PAL usage and learning outcomes across diverse school contexts. Our research questions explore the range of learning benefits PAL generates at scale, and identify predictors of success or failure at both school and student levels. By studying implementation patterns across hundreds of schools, we aim to provide evidence-based insights for policymakers on how to effectively scale educational technologies in developing countries. This work represents a crucial step in understanding the transition from research efficacy to practice at scale, with potential implications for education policy in India and beyond.
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.
Coverage: Ideas for India and Central Square Foundation:
Funding: Central Square Foundation