Developing Collective Impact to Improve Foundational Learning: Evidence from Madagascar
研究评估了马达加斯加教育部推广的“适当水平教学”培训及学校管理委员会能力建设干预措施的效果，发现该干预显著提升了学生的识字和算术成绩，且规模化后成本效益更高。
To address the severe learning crisis in Africa, the improvement of foundational learning is a priority policy issue. In Madagascar, the Ministry of Education began scaling up the training on the pedagogical approach, called Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), in primary education. This training was part of a package of interventions that aimed at strengthening the capacity of the school management committee (SMC) to develop collaboration between the school and the local community and organize remedial activities. As these interventions were scaled up progressively to increase their coverage of the regions, this study investigates their impact by the difference-in-differences strategy, targeting those schools in communes near the border of neighboring regions. In Year 1 of the research, the interventions helped the students who could not have read letters reach the level of reading words written in the local language. In Year 2, the interventions improved the learning outcome in numeracy by 0.39 standard deviations. Compared to the pilot phase, the scaled-up interventions improved the cost-effectiveness by at least 1.4 times in literacy and 1.7 times in numeracy. Developing the collaboration of different actors in Madagascar demonstrates a strategy to establish a collective impact to address the learning crisis.