Education remains one of the most promising way for many children to attain a fuller, more productive life. Many developing countries have improved access to education, but the quality of education has remained too low. So, though many more children are now in school, many of them are learning very little while in school. If universal education is to be attained in the truer sense of enabling these children, their families, and their communities to realize the promise of education, developing countries must improve the quality of the education they offer.

The Education Program promotes research aimed at providing policymakers and practitioners with the knowledge needed to design and implement more effective policies and programs, including:

• Survey research to provide current descriptive information on the status of education, and the challenges and opportunities faced by the children, parents, and communities and by teachers, schools, and governments.
• Randomized impact evaluations to provide rigorous scientific evidence on what policies and programs work.
• Cost-effectiveness Analysis to provide information on the relative cost effectiveness of potential solutions

The questions can be divided into following 7 domains: 

Pedagogy. Additional resources unaccompanied by changes in teaching behavior often have little or no effect on learning.

But there are many questions as to how teaching should be improved. For example, what teaching methods best meet the learning needs of children within the large and heterogeneous classes that are common in most developing countries? How much emphasis should be placed on teaching competencies rather than teaching specific content? Given the heterogeneous achievement level in the classes, should the grade structures be more flexible so that some children can take different subjects with different peer groups, taking math with one group and reading with another?

Technology. While most attempts to use information technology to promote more effective teaching in the richer countries have not been very successful, we see a much more positive picture from the few available studies in developing countries.

Why do we see this difference across these two sets of countries? Is it because of the low quality of teaching that is currently available? Is it because it allows children to learn at their own pace? Is it enough to give children computer time and allow them to use computers as they see fit, or do we need a structured learning program? How about the use of video lectures, especially in the advanced grades? How should technology be combined with in-school teaching?

Teacher training. What is the best way to train teachers who may not themselves be very well educated? What can be done to provide current teachers with the skills they need to better target children at different levels within a large classroom? How structured should the teaching be: should teachers be asked to follow a very specific plan or should they be given discretion? 

Teacher incentives and school governance. Evidence suggests that incentives for teachers work to generate better test scores, when they are implemented effectively.

But evidence on programs that decentralized incentives or empowered communities to control local schools has been much more mixed.  Many questions remain: Is it better to give teachers incentives based on attendance or test scores? Is the answer different if we care about end of year test scores or long-term learning? Why do we find many instances of parents being reluctant to exercise control over the schools even when they are legally entitled to do so? Is it because they do not believe that they can affect the learning outcomes of their children? Would more information on school performance induce greater participation from parents? What is the effect of offering school choice on parental choices, teacher effort, and child outcomes?

Incentives for children. What can be done to get children and parents from disadvantaged families to invest more effort into schooling? Evidence suggests that providing some incentives for children based on educational outcomes leads to increased effort and improved performance.

Evidence also suggests that a significant fraction of children and parents seriously underestimate the economic benefits of schooling for children of backgrounds such as theirs, and react positively to accurate information about the returns to schooling. What is the best way to design incentives? Should there be short-term incentives based on solving a specific set of problems or achieving a certain reading goal, or long-term incentives based on annual test scores or on exit exams for primary and secondary school? Should the emphasis be on levels of performance or on improvements in performance? Is there value to getting children to set their own goals? Should we involve parents in the goal setting process? How can children be given feedback about their performance without causing them to become discouraged? What is the effect of giving out information about specific career trajectories and what it would take to achieve them?

Preschool and Early Childhood Development. Institutionalized early childhood education, in particular pre-schooling (but also initiatives that provide extra support to children already in lower primary), could give underprivileged children a head start in the learning process, in particular first-generation learners whose parents never went to school or are illiterate. These programs could also enable the delivery of proper nutrition to children at ages when nutrition is supposed to contribute to brain development and future learning potential.

Post-primary education. Evidence is much stronger on primary education than on post-primary education. As many more children finish primary school, the need to provide them with quality post-primary education looms large. While many of the same issues raised above—pedagogy, technology, training, and incentives—may be important here too, there remain a number of issues specific to post-primary education about which little is known. What, for example, is the optimal age for children to be sent to different streams (academic versus vocational, science versus humanities)? How selective and binding should the streaming be? What is the best way to do the selection? What is the role of government subsidies to schools versus selective scholarships? What is the impact of vocational training, spoken-English training, soft-skills training, and career counseling? And what form should the training take: should vocational training programs be mostly in school or at hands-on apprentice work sites?

J-PAL's Education Program is co-chaired by Abhijit Banerjee and Paul Glewwe and the Program Managers are Kudzai Takavarasha and Shawn Powers, supported by Conner Brannen. For additional information please email smpowers@mit.edu.