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

This paper studies an education program targeting primary school children in rural India, which combines a standard in-school pedagogical intervention with an out-of-school study group program managed by parents. We rely on a crosscutting experimental design across 200 villages and find the full program to significantly increase children’s test scores in mathematics and language by 0.09 and 0.11 standard deviations respectively. When the two program components are implemented in isolation, there is no impact on children’s learning. The cost-effectiveness analysis highlights high returns from adopting a multidimensional approach that supports children’s learning processes both in and out of school.