Effects of a center, teacher, and community focused intervention in rural Bangalore preschools

• In Event: Collaborative impact: experimental evidence from IDELA partnerships driving ECD effectiveness and innovation

Proposal

This presentation reports on the results of a modestly sized, but methodologically strong, impact evaluation on the effect of a Philips van Heusen Foundation funded Save the Children intervention. The intervention sought to improve the quality of children’s early learning opportunities in Anganwadi centers (preschools) in rural Bangalore.

A cluster-randomized control trial was used to estimate the impact of the program. Fifty Anganwadi centers were randomly assigned to a “light touch” control group and “heavy touch” treatment group. The “light touch” control group received improvements to the physical space of the classroom (e.g. child-friendly classroom murals). The “heavy touch” group received the similar physical improvements, and in addition received Save the Children’s Emergent Literacy and Mathematics teacher training and materials intervention, a mobilization campaign, and support to organize mother’s and parents groups.

We estimate the impact of the program using the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA). A baseline survey was conducted prior to the start of the program, and an endline data collection was conducted eight months later.

We find that the addition of the “heavy touch” components of programming had a statistically significant and substantively meaningful effect on children’s developmental outcomes. Children in the treatment group gained, on average, over 50% more on the IDELA assessment than children in the control group, an effect size of 0.39 standard deviations.

The effect of the program was largest on children’s Emergent Numeracy and Motor skills. Children in the treatment group gained nearly twice as much as those in the control group for an effect size of 0.49 for Emergent Numeracy and 0.43 for Motor skills. The effect on Emergent Literacy skills was smaller, and not statistically significant. We observe no effect at all on children’s Social-Emotional development.

Our estimates of impact appear to be robust to a variety of model specifications. While we observed attrition of 18% between baseline and endline, it was non-differential between treatment groups and was not correlated with any baseline characteristics. We tested whether attrition may have biased our estimates and conclude that the restricted sample at endline was similarly balanced to the sample at baseline.

In addition to the IDELA assessment, we also conducted observations of Anganwadi centers and surveys on children’s home environments. These findings reinforced that children in treatment and control schools were similar in terms of background characteristics. Also, while the results are not as methodologically strong, we find that teachers in treatment Anganwadi centers demonstrated improved interactions with children and better numeracy-building activities, potentially contributing to their improved developmental status.

Authors

• Jonathan Seiden, Save the Children

• Romilla Karnati, Save the Children