GoKawiil
Tech News
A new study examined whether phone tutoring could offset learning losses when schools close, finding that students who received such tutoring showed measurable gains in math performance compared to peers without access to it. The research points to remote, low-tech tutoring as a viable stopgap during disruptions to in-person schooling.
A study spanning randomized trials in India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda found that 20-minute weekly tutoring calls to primary-school children produced substantial learning gains during COVID-19-related school closures. The approach paired widely available mobile phones with tutoring tailored to each child's current skill level, costing about $11 per child, and worked whether delivered by government teachers or NGO staff.
A study led by Oxford researcher Noam Angrist tested a low-cost intervention combining text-message nudges and a weekly 20-minute phone call from a teacher to support children's learning when schools shut down. The randomized trials, involving more than 16,000 households across India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda during COVID-19 closures, followed an earlier pilot in Botswana and were published in Nature.
A new Nature study by Angrist and colleagues examined how remote phone-based tutoring affected children's learning during periods when schools were shut, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research found strong evidence that this low-tech approach helped students keep learning despite the disruption, offering a rare data-backed solution to an otherwise poorly understood problem.