Improving children’s learning in developing countries: what works and what doesn’t

Abstract

Policymakers in low- and middle-income countries have been successful in getting children to school. However, spending more time in school has not led to the development of age-appropriate math and language skills. In contrast to earlier full-length systematic reviews, we will briefly summarize key findings and challenges from the education literature in development economics targeting this article towards non-specialists. Two findings emerge from our review: one, given the complementarities in educational inputs, we need policy interventions that target multiple inputs in a child production function to have the greatest impact on learning outcomes. Two, interventions that target teacher effort and student effort together appear to have the greatest promise in being able to facilitate learning among children.