Improving Enrollment and Learning Through Videos and Mobiles: Experimental Evidence from Northern Nigeria

World Bank (DIME) - Nigeria Partnership for Education Project

At Curious Learning, we dedicate ourselves to increasing access to content that helps children learn to read. We think a great deal about how to design the apps to promote learning and engagement. But how do we know that the apps are effective? This is an obviously vital question, as distributing games that don’t successfully teach children to read is of little value.

To that end, we began a collaboration with Middlesex University and the DIME division of the World Bank in 2018, which we reported on in an earlier essay. The goal was to study the impact of educational media and apps on school attendance, as well as literacy and numeracy abilities, in children in Northern Nigeria. This area of the world is of particular concern because of the high rate of out-of-school children and the low literacy rates among children and adults. In 2018 in Northern Nigeria, only 51% of children regularly attended school and only 40% of 30- to 34-year-olds had ever attended school. In 2019, only 3% of Grade 2 children could read a text and be able to answer at least 80% of the comprehension questions successfully. So, today’s children are not learning to read, and their parents are unlikely to have attended school with any regularity.

This project tested 2 innovations: the first was the use of movies to instruct and inspire parents regarding school attendance, and the second involved providing smartphones with preloaded educational apps for use outside of school. We recruited families that lived within 2 km of a school, and around 9,000 households took part. Half of them served as the control group, while the other half took part in the experiment. We invited parents in the treatment groups to watch movies that expressed the benefits of school attendance. In half of the treatment communities, a “lottery-style” draw was held at the time that families attended a showing of the movies. The “winners” of the draw received a smartphone that was preloaded with Feed the Monster in Hausa and Hausa stories from the Global Digital Library.

The researchers designated one child in each family, between the ages of 6 and 9, as the main child of interest and the other children in the home, between the ages of 6 and 20, as siblings. The main child and the siblings took tests to measure their reading and math skills. Parents took surveys asking about their attitudes towards school attendance, learning at home, early marriage, and other social norms.

The results were extraordinary. Children in the treatment groups were 42% less likely to be out of school, showing a significant boost in school attendance. This study began at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. School attendance was understandably low during this period, and yet, children in the treatment group were still more likely to attend school. 

But did the apps make any difference to what the children knew about reading? The evidence is strong for saying yes. First, children who had access to the learning apps were 42.5% less likely to score 0 on the test of letter knowledge. Zero-scores show the children cannot name even a single letter or read a single word. Second, the overall outcome of the apps on other literacy and numeracy tests showed that children who had access to the apps increased their literacy and numeracy skills by 0.46 and 0.63 standard deviations respectively in 12 months. For context, in World Bank study-schools a change in learning outcomes of 0.5 standard deviation required 5 years of instruction. In a comparison to 74 other interventions studied by the World Bank, the use of these apps scored 5th in terms of effectiveness and is the only intervention of the top ten that can be deployed immediately.

What is also interesting is the impact the use of apps in the home had on the other children in the household. The siblings of the children in homes that had access to the apps decreased Zero scores in letter recognition by 29%, and achieved an effect size, overall, in literacy and numeracy scores of .34 and .47 standard deviation. 

Outside of academic knowledge, there were effects on the siblings that are fascinating. In the treatment group with access to the apps, the rate of early childbearing in the siblings decreased by 13 percent, and the overall rate of childbearing and marriage in the siblings between the ages of 6 and 20 decreased by 15%. 

So, what have we learned about apps as an at-home intervention? We know that an intervention in which smartphones are used at home is a successful means of helping children learn how to read. Children in the groups that had access to Feed the Monster learned their letters and made significant progress in other areas of reading skills. We have also learned that the learning experience of a single child in the home affects the other children in the home. They also learn more about letters, words, and numbers. Providing access to digital educational tools through video and apps resulted in a substantial increase in the educational aspirations parents held for their children. Furthermore, the intervention decreased rates of early parenthood, early marriage, and entering the job market at a young age.

Curious Learning is continuing this work with the World Bank and Middlesex University, and extending the investigation of the apps to other countries. Why is this so important? To ensure that our work is effective, we are building a continuous cycle of evaluation and improvement into our model. Through these types of studies, we are always learning about how we can do better in the future. 

References:

Full Research Article

World Bank DIME presentations