To help prepare young children for success in primary school, MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Institute for Financial Management and Research in India (IFMR) (J-PAL South Asia) has applied decades of research on how children learn in order to develop a collection of simple, low-cost games that engage children’s natural math capacity to improve their formal math skills. P...
SEE ALLTo help prepare young children for success in primary school, MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Institute for Financial Management and Research in India (IFMR) (J-PAL South Asia) has applied decades of research on how children learn in order to develop a collection of simple, low-cost games that engage children’s natural math capacity to improve their formal math skills. Proven effective by multiple randomized controlled trials, the Math Games program requires only 45-minute sessions, three times per week and can be effectively delivered by lightly-trained volunteers or government teachers. With support from Development Innovation Ventures (DIV), J-PAL South Asia is providing technical assistance and monitoring and evaluation support to expand the program in Tamil Nadu’s public school system and partnering with state governments and the Indian NGO Pratham to expand Math Games to three more states (Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab). In addition, DIV is supporting a long-term follow-up study––led by cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard University and Nobel Prize-winning economist Esther Duflo of MIT––that measures the persistence of the program’s impact on the children from the original study. As Math Games continues to scale, it has the potential to significantly improve the foundational skills of 2.8 million children across these four states.
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