Thornton to Present at Joint Seminar in Development Economics on an Education Intervention

Posted: 11/4/2022 (Demography News)

Professor Rebecca Thornton from Baylor University will be presenting at the Joint Seminar in Development Economics. Don’t miss Dr. Thornton’s talk “Scaling-Up an Education Intervention: Experimental Evidence on Program Effectiveness, Exposure, and Sustainability” on Monday, November 7th starting at 11:00 AM in Savery 410!

 

 

Brief Description of the Paper:

Conventional wisdom suggests a tradeoff between program effectiveness and scale: programs implemented at larger scales utilize lower-quality inputs and tend to achieve smaller impacts. This paper isolates the effects of increased scale per se by disentangling scale-up from changes in input quality. We use data from an RCT that compares a literacy program to both a control group and a reduced-cost variant designed to emulate how education programs are typically scaled up. The reduced-cost version cuts back on the quality and quantity of teacher training, which is one of the most-important and most-expensive inputs provided by the program. We contrast this reduced-cost version with how the program’s impacts change when it was actually scaled up by 230%. Cutting back on the quality and quantity of training causes large declines in the effectiveness of the program, but scaling up the program has little impact on its effectiveness. We also compare sustainability of the program and can compare how multiple student exposure affects long-run effects with how program effectiveness fades for teachers.

 

Date: 11/07/2022

Time: 11:00 AM

Location: Savery 410