Education: A universal solution to global development challenges?

Earlier this year, when Saloni Gupta, then a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford King Center on Global Development, presented the results of an experiment on the effectiveness of a personalized adaptive learning (PAL) program in India, the policymakers from the Indian government who attended the virtual meeting were moved to tears.

The program—delivered to students on tablets, tailoring content to the level of each student using it—led to learning improvements in mathematics that equated to, on average, nearly two years of schooling compared to students who did not participate.

“Everyone was choked up,” recalls Gupta, who is now an assistant professor in Brown University’s Department of Education. “The government team had worked incredibly hard to integrate this evidence-backed innovation."

Now, the relevant state government plans to expand the program, and Gupta is involved in an ongoing evaluation that will test how to improve schools’ uptake of the software.

“We found that usage is predictive of learning gains,” she says. “This means that a simple measure of software usage can help us track learning gains without conducting expensive independent assessments as the program scales up.”

King Center Faculty Director Katherine Casey said Gupta's work is emblematic of King Center research. “These are exciting results, both in terms of the large documented gains in learning and the potential to scale at relatively low cost, exactly the type of solutions that can work in (increasingly) resource-constrained settings.” 

In projects that span the globe, and especially in developing countries, King Center faculty affiliates and fellows are trying to improve outcomes in education, a field that underpins development—both personal and economic. Education expands opportunities and drives socioeconomic mobility, equipping people with better health outcomes and overall well-being across nearly every dimension of life. King Center researchers are asking bold questions about how children learn, how creativity can be fostered, and how technology can unlock new possibilities.

Unlocking Innovation

In addition to her work on the PAL program in India, Gupta has done other research in the country, including on creative problem solving and innovation. 

“Innovation is fundamental to economic growth—it’s really central,” she says. “But we don’t know how to measure it in schools; we don’t even focus on it in schools.”

Gupta conducted a randomized control trial testing the effectiveness of an innovation training program in India with nearly 5,000 eighth grade students in 80 public schools. She found that the program, which included 60 hours of training over two academic years, improved out-of-the-box thinking. Participating students from the treatment group secured about 24 percent more funding in an exercise in which independent blind reviewers judged student ideas, which ranged from walking sticks with GPS devices to a water bottle with pill compartments for chronically ill people.

The program, which is run by trained peer facilitators, costs about $40 per student. Gupta is now seeing if some of her findings can be used to improve a multi-state innovation development program in India that costs three times as much. 

“Measuring a skill like creative problem solving is quite undefined,” Gupta says. “We’re trying to understand: How do you teach something that is so central to economic growth?”

Navigating the Perks and Pitfalls of Technology

Technology is omnipresent in any conversation about education in the 21st century, and many King Center researchers are studying the advantages—and disadvantages—of new approaches to content sharing and learning.

Mridul Joshi, a recipient of King Center Graduate Student Research Funding, is  studying digital self-regulation in an ongoing experiment testing whether Indian college students can better manage their social media use through participation in a digital empowerment curriculum delivered through their universities. 

The issue is timely, as schools and public health officials around the world consider how best to protect children from the harms of social media, including by banning smartphones in schools or banning social media for younger children. Joshi’s study, however, focuses on a different approach. In contrast to blanket restrictions, it evaluates whether brief educational interventions can support students in developing self-directed strategies to manage their digital habits. Joshi and his colleagues are running their randomized control trial with approximately 4,000 college students in Punjab, India. They are interested in whether the curriculum, which introduces students to platform design features, teaches them how to identify misinformation, and encourages the use of tools for setting app limits, can change students’ smartphone habits. 

The researchers are asking participants to self-report their social media usage but are also able to monitor their usage through an app that tracks smartphone activity every five seconds. Joshi says such data has not previously been collected in a developing country.

He hopes his study will provide insights into digital addiction and habit formation. For instance, how do students who only recently acquired a smartphone compare in their social media usage to students who have owned smartphones for years?

Social media is becoming an important area of study within economics because education is viewed as a way to build human capital, and, in recent years, social media has been identified as an impediment to education. Teaching students to manage their time and use social media and smartphones more intentionally could have wide-ranging benefits.

“If we see even small effects, it could be a very scalable idea,” Joshi says. “It’s not hard for universities or even high schools to provide an hour-long session three times over three weeks. It’s something we’re very excited about.”

A Deep Dive into Literacy in Brazil

Other King Center researchers are focused on more traditional school subjects. Faculty Affiliate Guilherme Lichand, for instance, is studying how best to assess reading skills in Brazil, where just over half of second graders are able to read at grade level by second grade.

Lichand’s study tests the effectiveness of a Stanford-developed digital reading assessment, the Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR), in more than 2,500 first to fifth graders in Brazil. Compared to conventional standardized tests, which are typically more expensive, require external graders, and have delayed results, ROAR can be taken simultaneously by all students on digital devices and provides instant feedback. It’s also a silent reading test, making it more equitable for students who might have speech impediments or who struggle with reading out loud.

Although ROAR has been used in 16 states in the United States (it was recently selected as one of the tests to screen children for reading challenges in California), it has not been used at scale in developing countries. After Lichand’s study, that may change. 

Lichand found that ROAR not only correlates well with students’ performance on existing reading assessments, but also provides more specific data that can help teachers target interventions to individual students and guide policymakers seeking to address broader trends.

Lichand has since used ROAR in a larger sample focused on older children with significant reading delays. The potential for progress is huge, he says.

“It’s been 20 years since Brazil started measuring literacy and there have been no big changes in that period,” he says. “The power of having an assessment that can very quickly tell teachers what to do—as long as that’s paired with research about the best way to deliver information—can really unlock gains that have unfortunately been very slow.”

Monitoring Children’s Brain Development

Reading is central to children’s academic trajectories. Another less studied but foundational part of development is executive function (EF), defined as working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Those skills are essential to human development and can predict future outcomes in education, health, and employment.

Two King Center researchers—PhD student Mateus Mazzaferro and Ishita Ahmed, now a postdoctoral fellow in the Stanford Project on Adaptation and Resilience in Kids (SPARK) Lab—are studying EF in the first extensions of Stanford-developed measures in Brazil and Bangladesh, respectively.

Ahmed and Mazzaferro are part of a team of researchers at Stanford’s Global Executive Function Initiative, which aims to increase research capacity on EF around the world and especially in low-resource settings.

Ahmed’s dissertation was based on three studies she conducted in Bangladesh to see how children use their EF skills in everyday life and how best to assess those skills with culturally relevant measures. In one, she used a novel assessment she calls the Body Span to test the working memory of children. She argues physical assessments may be more effective at assessing EF skills in certain cultures, including Islamic societies where movement is incorporated into prayer.

Compared to existing working memory measures based on verbal and spatial awareness tasks, Ahmed’s Body Span test, which asked children to observe and then tap their head, shoulders, elbows, and stomach in sequences of increasing length, proved to be predictive of children’s working memory abilities in academic and everyday life settings, making it a potentially more inclusive tool.

“EF skills matter for children’s academic learning and for how children do things every day,” Ahmed says. “This is a skill that we should be trying to capture in different contexts so we can understand if children need further support or interventions from parents or teachers.”

How Crises Affect Children’s Education

Recent research from King Center Faculty Affiliate Eran Bendavid, a professor of medicine and health policy, looked at the impact of tropical cyclones on school attendance. Based on the records of more than five million children in 13 low- and middle-income countries (including Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and the Philippines) over more than 50 years, Bendavid and his team found that children who were exposed to tropical cyclones during preschool are more likely to never attend school, with more powerful storms having larger negative effects on schooling. Between 2000 and 2020, that equates to about 79,000 children not starting school in the studied countries. Possible reasons include physical damage to schools or the roads that lead to schools; damage to children’s homes requiring them to stay home to help with recovery efforts; or economic losses leading parents to put their children to work.

Climate change is expected to increase the impact of tropical cyclones in the future. “The effects of tropical cyclones that have to do with physical damage are well known,” Bendavid says. “This is the first time we are kind of showing that, among the things to pay attention to [in preparation for and in the wake of tropical cyclones], are kids starting school. It’s hard to improve educational attainment—it’s not always clear what works—so identifying a spot where you have a lever to improve education is really important.”

Sociology PhD student Swan Htut is exploring education in the context of another growing and global crisis: the numbers of refugees and other people displaced from their home countries.

Htut’s qualitative study takes place among Chin refugees from Myanmar in India’s Mizoram state. The Chin people are an ethnic minority in Myanmar who have faced persecution in the country, including after the 2021 military coup. Some Chin people have sought a home in Mizoram where they have ancestral ethnic ties. 

In speaking with refugee parents and children, Htut has learned that Chin refugee camps teach students based on a curriculum provided by the New Unity Government, a pro-democracy body in exile from the military-run country. In general, children are able to attend school through high school; some universities have accepted refugee youth, but, more often, higher education is out of the picture because enrolling requires formal documentation that refugee youth do not have. 

Htut’s interviews, conducted in part with the Chin Youth Organization of North America and also with the help of a refugee group on the ground in Mizoram’s capital city, have revealed that education is a driving force in the lives of refugee families.

“A lot of people came to India thinking, ‘My kids might be able to go to school here,’ since the Myanmar education system is crumbling,” he explains. “Education as an idea and an actual skill is so core to what keeps these refugee communities going. A lot of them are feeling really hopeless about the future. Children are their main hope.”

Although refugees get little humanitarian aid, refugee-led organizations on the ground continue to provide resources and training to refugee camps. Local donors also provide support and donations towards the school. Htut is continuing his collaboration with refugee camp communities to provide online classes, help students access necessary classroom materials and plan future fieldwork trips to connect local NGOs with refugees for further collaboration.

Mapping Global Education Reforms

Many education researchers study specific policies to assess their impact on learning or other outcomes. Thanks to a new and growing database co-created by King Center Faculty Affiliate Patricia Bromley, that may be easier to do. 

In 2019, Bromley and a colleague realized there was no good resource compiling education reforms around the world. So, with a team of undergraduate researchers, they set out to create one, categorizing reforms in reports that countries submit to multilateral organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, and UNESCO. Today, their World Education Reform Database has more than 14,000 reforms from 216 countries. The database offers a lens into education trends globally.

“It tells us what countries think is important in the world,” Bromley says. “Reform is a very specific kind of change,” Bromley says. “It’s within the system; it’s intentional, with a high belief in human control over the future. It’s not a thing that everybody believes in.”

One insight from more recent entries: Reform, in general, is on the decline.

In the United States, for instance, Bromley points to President Trump’s actions to disband the U.S. Department of Education. Dismantling a system, she says, does not count as reform.

Shayla Fitzsimmons-Call, an undergraduate researcher assisting on the project, says the work has shown her the importance of data in illuminating broader trends over time.

“There are so many things we don’t know,” she says. “There’s real purpose in this work.”

Education Works Everywhere 

Applied research is the driving force behind the King Center’s mission. The center’s multidisciplinary approach aims to provide data-driven solutions that can shape policy and practice while also training and inspiring a new generation of global leaders.

In education, that research includes not just inquiries into subjects like math and reading but also projects that explore the development of higher-level thinking such as innovation, foundational executive function skills, and the contexts in which learning takes place, or doesn’t. Understanding all of that is crucial for economic development.

Bendavid, who has studied education’s impact on population health in general, points out that education “is one of the most effective technologies—and I use that word deliberatively—for improving health and well-being.” He emphasizes, “It works in every context and at every level.”