How to teach English in India: testing the relative productivity of instruction methods within the Pratham English language education program

Using a pair of randomized evaluations, we assess the relative productivity of several modes of implementing an Indian English education curriculum. Each consists of a specially designed machine or flash card based activities implemented either indirectly through a teacher training program or directly by externally supervised teaching assistants. The new methods are very effective and, on average, all implementation strategies yield gains of about 0.25-0.35 standard deviations in students’ knowledge of English. Weaker students benefit more from interventions that include teacher directed activities while stronger students benefit more from the more self-paced machine-based implementation. Compared to an externally implemented version of the curriculum, the treatments implemented through the teacher training program improved students’ math and English scores rather than just their English scores, a result that may be due to the fact that teachers implemented the interventions more efficiently.