Estimating the impact of educational television on literacy, gender, and SEL

Katumbi Lara, Salome Njambi, Anushka Ghosh, Shilvaan Patel and Nicolas Bottan.

Edtech Title@2x

SECTOR

Education

PROJECT TYPE

Research Experiments

Location

Kenya

BEHAVIORAL THEME

EdTech
OVERVIEW

This paper presents evidence from a large randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Kenya, investigating the effects of watching a new children’s educational TV show at home. One novel aspect of the show is that, besides being instructional, it focuses on changing children’s mindsets about reading, gender attitudes, and socioemotional learning. We recruited 4,300 children from 346 public schools. Students in randomly selected treatment schools received encouragement to watch the publicly broadcasted TV show. We sent parents biweekly SMS reminders about the time and channel the TV show aired. Students in control schools did not receive any encouragement or reminders about the show. The TV show is a cartoon program named Nuzo & Namia that targets children aged 6 to 9. It was created in 2023 by Ubongo and its main educational objective is to improve literacy. Additionally, it aims to change gender norms and encourage different forms of socio-emotional learning (i.e., confidence and curiosity). Identifying the causal effect of our encouragement treatment relies on random assignment at the school level. Our primary estimates captured intention-to treat (ITT) effects. We used a household survey to collect data. We collected endline data a year after the baseline and after about 9 months of exposure to the TV show. The endline survey also collected self-reported measures of watching the show to estimate the local average treatment effects (LATE) for treatment compliers. 

THEMATIC AREAS

We study three categories of main outcomes: literacy including reading and comprehension, gender attitudes, and socio-emotional learning (SEL). We employed the Early Grade Reading Assessment Tool (United States Agency for International Development [USAID], 2016) to measure literacy and construct a measure for reading fluency and comprehension. We study three dimensions of gender attitudes: gender stereotype knowledge and flexibility, gender roles, and in- and out-group attitudes and activities.. As a measure of socio-emotional learning, we construct a score combining confidence and curiosity measures. The ITT estimates from the encouragement design reveal that the Nuzo and Namia TV show had no effect on literacy. However, we find a positive and statistically significant impact of the show on gender attitudes and on SEL