Blog

Looking Back at the RISE Conference 2022: Session 2 on Learning

In the second session of the 2022 RISE Annual Conference, presenters explored a wide variety of factors, ranging from the individual to the national, that can affect children's learning.

Authors

Image of Lillie Kilburn

Lillie Kilburn

RISE Directorate

Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

Chaired by Luis Crouch, the session brought together research from Ethiopia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Bangladesh on factors that influence learning:

Educational Effectiveness in the Shifting Context of the Ethiopian Grade 4 Classroom: What Can be Learned from Value-Added Analysis?

Caine Rolleston presented research (with co-authors Moses Oketch, Jack Rossiter, and Dawit Tibebu Tiruneh) on patterns in learning progress in Grade 4 over time in Ethiopia. He explored what these patterns reveal in terms of equity of outcomes for disadvantaged groups in Ethiopia and what these findings suggest for the success of GEQIP, Ethiopia's General Education Quality Improvement Project. His slide deck is available for viewing.

The Joint Role of School and Home Inputs in Children’s Learning

Anusha Guha presented research (with co-authors Pedro Carneiro, Michele Giannola, and Sonya Krutikova) exploring, in the context of Vietnam, the combined effect of parents and schools on learning and examining whether home inputs adjust to the quality of school inputs. She showed that school and home inputs are both important, with time investment at home being especially influential. Her paper is available for reading.

Cognitive and Socio-Emotional Skills in Low-Income Countries: Construct and Predictive Validity

Alice Danon presented research (with co-authors Jishnu Das, Deon Filmer, and Andreas de Barros) on the cognitive and socio-emotional skills of young adults from rural Pakistan. She described relationships between education, skills, and labour market outcomes, taking into account the prevalence of migration, and concluded that although schooling, cognitive skills, and socio-emotional skills were strongly correlated with earnings, those factors explained only a relatively small portion of variation in labour earnings.

Centrality-Based Spillover Effects

Michael Vlassopoulos presented research (with co-authors Asad Islam, Yves Zenou, and Xin Zhang) asking: do students who are more central in social networks generate stronger spillover effects on their classmates? He described a large experiment with primary students in rural Bangladesh in which a private tutoring intervention targeted toward students who were more central in social networks did create larger improvements for both treated and untreated classmates compared to random assignment. His paper is available for reading.

Watch the video of the session:

RISE blog posts and podcasts reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the organisation or our funders.