Every Child Counts! Scaling Up a Successful Games-Based Curriculum - J-PAL

Despite significant gains in primary school enrollment, 125 million children worldwide are not developing basic math and reading skills. Many children in India are not ready for primary school: 43 percent of first graders in rural areas cannot recognize letters and 36 percent cannot recognize single-digit numbers (ASER 2018). Evidence shows that achievement gaps between low and high-performing children widen steadily over time, and few children who start behind ever catch up. To help prepare young children for success in primary school, MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL South Asia) based at the Institute for Financial Management and Research in India (IFMR) 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. Since 2022, it has been piloted in pre-primary and primary classes in government schools in Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka, and the program is now being scaled to 36,000 classrooms in Andhra Pradesh, 13,000 classrooms in Punjab, and 6,600 classrooms in Himachal Pradesh. With support from the DIV Fund, J-PAL South Asia is providing technical assistance and monitoring and evaluation support to expand the program within the public school system and is partnering with state governments and the Indian NGO Pratham to expand Math Games both to and within additional states. In addition, the DIV Fund 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.