The Impact of Diagnostic Feedback to Teachers on Student Learning: Experimental Evidence from India

Abstract

While the use of high-stakes testing in education is increasingly common, it is also controversial as opponents argue that these tests lead to distortion of teacher activity towards the test and away from activities that are not incentivized. An alternate use of tests that is suggested as a way of improving student learning outcomes is to use lowstakes tests to provide teachers with detailed diagnostic feedback on how their students are performing. It is posited that simply providing this information can help improve teaching practices, teacher goal setting, and student learning outcomes (without the distortions induced by high-stakes testing). We present experimental evidence on the impact of a program that provided low-stakes diagnostic tests and feedback and lowstakes monitoring of classroom processes across a representative set of schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. We find that the teachers in the treatment schools appear to be working harder when measured by observers in the classroom, but that the students in these schools do no better on independent tests than students in schools that did not receive the program. This suggests that though teachers in the program worked harder while being observed, there was no impact of the feedback and monitoring on student learning outcomes. JEL Classification: I21, O15

Improving Learning in Primary Schools of Developing Countries

“…The cited article includes results on two performance incentive treatments, whereas Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2010a) and Das et al (2011) report evidence on a contract teacher treatment and a block grant treatment, respectively. A fourth article posits that the control group in the aforementioned experiment is itself an informational treatment, since students were tested and teachers received this performance feedback (Muralidharan & Sundararaman, 2010b). The authors randomly selected a separate control group of schools that were not tested until follow-up.…”

Student and teacher attendance: The role of shared goods in reducing absenteeism

“…12 See, for example, Glewwe, Ilias and Kremer (2010), Podgursky and Springer (2007), and Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2010).…”

The Fiscal Cost of Weak Governance: Evidence from Teacher Absence in India

“…However, while C{1} is known, there is uncertainty around B{1} and thus a randomized trial in the context of a policy movement towards {1} would reduce the uncertainty around B{1}. 26 The largest education experiments to date that we know of have been conducted over five districts in one state of India (Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2010, 2013. While these experiments feature random assignment in representative samples of schools (in a state with over 80 million people), they still come from just one state, compared to the estimates in this paper that use panel data from 190 districts across 19 states.…”