UD's Adrienne Lucas recently won a $50,000 grant to conduct research on the cost-effectiveness of raising student achievement in schools in Africa and India. The funding is part of a $300,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation through its Quality of Education in Developing Countries (QEDC) initiative, which provides an opportunity to compare the impacts and cost-effectiveness of six school interventions.
During the past year, Lucas has worked closely with Patrick McEwan of Wellesley College and Maria Perez of the University of Washington to evaluate the overall effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a classroom intervention in Kenya and Uganda. The project examines whether the Reading to Learn Program, which mentored and trained teachers and provided limited classroom resources, can increase the quality of education in both countries.
Schools in the two countries were randomly selected to be either in the "treatment" or "control" groups. All schools received the standard government materials. Additionally, treatment schools were given the intervention. All students in the treatment and control schools were given both a pre- and post-test. Lucas is comparing the test score gains of the treatment students to the control students to assess the effectiveness of the intervention.
Last year, practitioners from Sub-Saharan Africa and India met at a conference organized by Lucas and her team to present preliminary findings from all of the QEDC studies.
The team is now conducting a meta-analysis of all developing country, school-based, primary school interventions that measured an achievement outcome and plan to draw together the disparate studies into a cohesive narrative that will inform future education policy.