Access to Technology and Secondary Educational Outcomes: Empirical Evidence from India

Prashant Poddar , University of Oxford
Ridhi Kashyap, University of Oxford
Valentina Rotondi, SUPSI & University of Oxford

Digital resources such as laptops have the potential to improve access to educational resources and provide personalized and uninterrupted learning opportunities. The impacts of these technologies may be especially salient in contexts where classroom sizes are large and schooling quality poor. Here we study the impacts of laptops on educational outcomes in one such context – India – exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the implementation of a laptop distribution programme among government school students, the Tamil Nadu Free Laptop Scheme. We find strong, positive effects on educational outcomes including math and reading ability among students exposed to the programme. We further find that students use laptops as a substitute for private tuition, which suggests that providing higher quality educational resources could improve learning outcomes. However, the benefits of the programme do not accrue evenly by gender, with boys likely to be the main beneficiaries and girls experiencing minimal impacts.

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 Presented in Session P3. Migration, Economics, Policies, History