Moving to Tech-based Opportunity

Peer effects enter education production complementarily, yet students in underserved areas often lack access to high-achieving peers. This absence limits positive learning spillovers while exposing students to negative peer effects such as motivation deficits and classroom disruptions (Lavy et al., 2011), fostering a culture of underachievement. Traditional interventions focusing on improving schools or relocating people (e.g., Moving to Opportunity) might address peer effects. However, these approaches face scalability issues and general equilibrium effects (Agostinelli et al., 2023). We propose a cost-effective, scalable alternative: Moving to Tech-Based Opportunity (MTechO, henceforth). MTechO is an online platform designed to facilitate structured peer learning across diverse student backgrounds. Through curriculum-aligned problem-solving, students engage in collaborative learning while receiving weekly productivity reports. The platform tracks both cognitive outcomes (quiz performance) and non-cognitive skills (communication, prosociality) via personalized dashboards, which incentivize engagement and mitigate incentive asymmetries between low- and high-achievers. Our target population is high school students in Benin, where regional disparities in school completion and performance persist. Schools are classified as low- or high-achieving, with students randomly assigned to treatment or control within each achievement strata. Treatment students from low-achieving schools are paired one-to-one with peers from high-achieving schools and granted platform access. To sustain engagement, treatment students receive a web participation fee, while control students receive a study incentive to isolate MTechO effects. We measure outcomes via surveys and administrative data (test scores). Our implementation partners include ESPOIR POUR TOUS and government agencies, handling school outreach and data collection.