“The researchers conducted five randomized trials in India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda during COVID-19 school closures between 2020 and 2022. More than 16,000 households took part, with one primary-school child enrolled from each household. Most children were in grades 3 to 5, except in Kenya, where the participants were in grades 1 and 2…

Children were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Pupils in the control group received no extra educational support. A second group received weekly text messages containing learning prompts with content related to mathematics, as well as nudges to study. A third group received the same text messages along with weekly tutoring calls for either 8 or 12 weeks…

Across the five countries, children who received tutoring plus text messages improved the most. The children who received only text messages had modest improvements in their learning compared with the control group.

However, the size of the effect varied between countries, with the largest improvements seen in Uganda and the Philippines. In Uganda, 17% of grade 4 students in the control group knew how to divide numbers at the start of the study, but this dropped to only 10% by the end of the study. By contrast, 48% of students who received extra support could divide by the end of the study, up from 13% who could do this before the intervention…

The intervention cost about US$11 per child. The researchers estimate that this translated to 3.6 years of high-quality schooling for every $100 spent.”

From Nature.