Measuring the Learning Benefits of Electronic Teaching Aids in Low-Resource Classrooms

Though there has been widespread enthusiasm to leverage technology to strengthen low-resource classrooms, to date very few programs have documented rigorous benefits from such interventions. In this paper, we describe an exploratory evaluation of the use of pre-packaged electronic teaching aids, consisting of presentation slides and multimedia content, in a government school in peri-urban India. Via a small-scale randomized controlled trial, encompassing 2 subjects, 72 students, and a 3-week intervention, we measure the impact of the electronic content on learning outcomes. In one subject (English), we find that the intervention significantly increases student scores, measured both by a custom exam as well as a standard unit test in the school. However, in another subject (science), we do not find any evidence for learning benefits. Despite its small scale, this study shows that it is possible to bolster learning in low-resource schools via use of electronic teaching aids, thereby justifying investment in larger scale trials in the future.