Online tutoring reduces by half the learning loss due to school closures: Evidence from a randomized experiment in Kenya
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We evaluate the effects of an online tutoring program that started in 2016 and continued during the pandemic despite the schools being closed for 9 months in Kenya. Using videoconferences, volunteer students from a Canadian university tutored grade 6 students (12 years old) in a rural school in Kenya, on the topics of Maths and English. We implement a randomized experiment to test the effects. We find no effect when the schools are open, but a large effect when the schools are closed (0.4 SD increase in exam scores in the treatment group versus control group). Since we have data from before the pandemic, we are able to quantify the learning loss due to COVID-19: 0.8 SD. We conclude that online tutoring compensates half of the learning loss.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it