Intervening at Home and Then at School : A Randomized Evaluation of Two Approaches to Improve Early Educational Outcomes in Tonga
This paper evaluates and compares two randomized interventions in Tonga, one targeting the home environment of children up to age 5 and one targeting the school environment for first and second grade students. The first intervention supports commun...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/749601545227173514/Intervening-at-Home-and-Then-at-School-A-Randomized-Evaluation-of-Two-Approaches-to-Improve-Early-Educational-Outcomes-in-Tonga http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31084 |
| Summary: | This paper evaluates and compares two
randomized interventions in Tonga, one targeting the home
environment of children up to age 5 and one targeting the
school environment for first and second grade students. The
first intervention supports communities to set up and run
playgroups that aim to improve caregiver-child interaction
at home and ultimately improve children's readiness for
school. Among children of mothers without high school
education, being in a treatment community positively affects
the school readiness literacy domains and overall score by
0.19 and 0.2 standard deviation, respectively, for girls and
the literacy domains for boys by 0.17 standard deviation.
The second intervention provides teachers with training,
materials, and coaching to improve reading instruction
practices and students’ reading ability. It increased
average early grade reading scores by approximately 0.18
standard deviation per year of exposure. Two cohorts of
children were potentially exposed to both interventions,
providing an opportunity to compare, for the same population
of children, the effects of an early childhood intervention
with a school-based intervention using a common measure of
learning achievement. The school readiness intervention is
found to have positive effects on early grade reading scores
only among children in the reading intervention’s control
group; effect sizes of approximately 0.29 standard deviation
were found at the end of second grade for children exposed
to one year of the school readiness intervention and at the
end of first grade for girls exposed to two years of the intervention. |
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