The Impact of Online Computer Assisted Learning at Home for Disadvantaged Children in Taiwan: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

Bin Tang,Yue Ma,Wei-Ting Hung,Te-Tien Ting,Chyi-In Wu,Di Mo,Scott Rozelle

doi:10.3390/su122310092

Abstract

In Taiwan, thousands of students from Yuanzhumin (aboriginal) families lag far behind their Han counterparts in academic achievement. When they fall behind, they often have no way to catch up. There is increased interest among both educators and policymakers in helping underperforming students catch up using computer-assisted learning (CAL). The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of an intervention aimed at raising the academic performance of students using an in-home CAL program. According to intention-to-treat estimates, in-home CAL improved the overall math scores of students in the treatment group relative to the control group by 0.08 to 0.20 standard deviations (depending on whether the treatment was for one or two semesters). Furthermore, Average Treatment Effect on the Treated analysis was used for solving the compliance problem in our experiment, showing that in-home CAL raised academic performance by 0.36 standard deviations among compliers. This study thus presents preliminary evidence that an in-home CAL program has the potential to boost the learning outcomes of disadvantaged students.

Highlights

The education of the poor and disadvantaged populations has been a long-standing challenge for education systems in both developed and developing countries [1,2,3,4]
We present the results of an randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on an in-home computer-assisted learning (CAL) intervention involving 1539 fourth and fifth grade students across 84 Yuanzhumin schools in Taiwan
ITT analysis is based on the initial treatment assignment and not on the treatment eventually received and is intended to avoid various misleading artifacts that can arise in intervention research, such as non-random attrition of participants from the study or crossover

Summary

Introduction

The education of the poor and disadvantaged populations has been a long-standing challenge for education systems in both developed and developing countries [1,2,3,4]. From the national level, when the proportion of the labor force with a relatively high level of education is low, economic growth is slowed down [5,6], which is not conducive to the country’s long-term and stable development [7]. International literature suggests that the education gap among vulnerable and better-off groups will lead to long-term differences in human capital accumulation [8,9,10] and income level among the population [11,12], with implications for growth and social stability. Despite high levels of educational attainment and economic development in Taiwan, China, there is a “development gap” between aboriginal Taiwanese (primarily living in rural areas; Yuanzhumin) students and Han students (primarily living in urban areas). In terms of academic achievement, Yuanzhumin students score significantly lower than Han students, and evidence indicates that the gap in educational achievement is growing wider [17,18,19]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion