Do Extra Hours of Tuition Pay Off?

Presented at IGC Bangladesh Conference December 20, 2011 Do Extra Hours of Tuition Pay Off? Atonu Rabbani (Department of Economics, University of Dhaka) Ummul Hasanath Ruthbah (Department of Economics, University of Dhaka) with Salim Hossain (Department of Psychology, University of Dhaka) Golam Sarwar (ERG)

Primary School Education in Bangladesh • In Bangladesh 9% of all children, aged between 6 – 10 years, are left out of school. • 47% of those who enrol drop out before completing grade 5. • Very low level of achievements in basic competency tests. • There is also a huge disparity in the quality of education.

Government Policy • GoB Policy on primary education are based on World Education Forum 2000 Framework and MDG 2 and are reflected in the Bangladesh Education Policy 2010 as: • Providing universal primary education, • Increasing the completion rate of primary education, • Reducing the rate of drop outs, • Reducing the rate of repetition, • Improving the quality of primary education, • Resolving the problem of scarcity of teachers and teaching materials, • Implementation of unified primary education program, • Extending primary education to grade VIII.

Supplementary Tutoring by CDIP: the Education Support Program (ESP) • CDIP has been operating learning centres adjacent to primary schools in different districts of Bangladesh since 2005. • These centres provide supplementary tuition (about 10 hours per week) to primary school students in nursery, grade 1 and grade 2. • Currently it operates through 1,750 learning centres adjacent to the primary schools. • The goals are: • To improve class performance (i.e. test scores) of grade 1 and 2 students from poor and illiterate households; • To strengthen the educational foundation of the students belonging to poor and illiterate households at the entry level; and • To reduce the primary school dropout rate in its geographic areas of operation.

Supplementary Tutoring by CDIP: the Education Support Program (ESP) • CDIP has planned to extend this program further in other parts of the country. • For further expansion of the ESP, it is important for CDIP to explore whether this supplementary tutoring has been achieving its intended goals. • The objectives / scope of the evaluation study set by ERG are: • To estimate the short term and long term effect of the ESP on students’ class performance; • To estimate the effect of the program on primary school dropout rates; and

Methodology • The DID approach- estimate the “treatment effect on the treated”. • Students who were in grade 2 in 2008 and received the tutoring in CDIP learning centres constitute the treatment group. • Those who were in grade 2 in 2008 but didn’t receive tutoring at CDIP learning centres constitute the control group. • For both the treatment and the control groups the performance of the students in grade one can be viewed as the pre treatment observations. • Then their performance in the final exams of grade two, grade three and grade four can be viewed as the post treatment observations.

Methodology

Sampling Strategy • CDIP had 304 learning centres in 2008 operating in 33 unions of 8 upazilas in Bangladesh. • Only 262 centres had students from grade 2. • We would require a total of 1900 observations (950 in each of treatment and control groups) selected from 159 learning centres and the associated primary schools. • Multistage sampling • Select the learning centres • Select students who were in grade 2 in 2008 and participated in the program • Select control students (6 on average) from the schools who were in grade 2 in 2008 but did not participate in the program.

The Surveys • There will be three sets of information: • Performance of the treatment and control students in the final exams in grade one (2007), grade two (2008), grade three (2009), grade four (2010) and in the first term in grade five (2011) - to be collected from the primary schools. • Background of students in both treatment and control groups – socio-economic conditions, to be collected through a household survey. • School information – to be collected from the primary schools.

The field experience • It was not possible to follow this sampling strategy in the field. • Could not get the complete list of students who were in grade two in 2008 and attended the ESP. • We collected data on 2147 students, of whom 1078 students attended 144 different CDIP learning centers in 2008. • The schools could provide the marks for 2007 when the students were in class one for only 1215 students. • Therefore we were forced to use this subsample for our analysis.

Data: household characteristics

Data: student characteristics

Data: scores obtained in final exams

Results: class performance (did estimates)

Results: dropout rate (logit and probit estimates)

Figure 1: total marks obtained

Figure 2: difference in marks between pre-post treatment years

Conclusion • The intervention lowered the drop-rates significantly. • It is possible that such interventions can have a higher average treatment effect in the population and scaling up of the program can further give opportunity to understand this. • The education support program did not exhibit any significant (statistically or point-wise) impact on test scores. • The control group chose to receive similar treatments from other sources (e.g. private tutors). • There were lots of “good” and privileged students who definitely biased the impact downward. • It is difficult to make a proper evaluation ex post. Even after carefully selecting a sample our study was seriously constrained by availability of data

Implications • After-hour tuitions offered to students did manage to retain students through grade 5 once they received the interventions during grade 2. • Because of selection of schools, the benchmark drop-out rates were lower than national average. Yet the intervention lowered the drop-rates significantly. • However, it is not through increasing-the-returns-from-better-education-by-increasing-test-scores channel! • What next?

Thank you.

Do Extra Hours of Tuition Pay Off?