University of Toronto
One Click Away: AI Tutoring with Khanmigo in a Two-Year School Experiment
Generative AI has been promoted as the technology that could transform education by providing every student a personal tutor. We provide some of the first large-scale experimental evidence, from a two-year cluster randomized trial in 18 Tennessee middle schools in which randomly assigned… more →
Making AI Tutoring Productive: Evidence from a Mastery-Based Math Practice Experiment
Large language models (LLMs) can make tutoring more scalable, but only if students use them to reason through mistakes rather than avoid effort. We study this question in a randomized field experiment with more than 6,000 middle-school students in Hamilton County Schools using NUMI, a research… more →
Virtual Tutoring with Computer-Assisted Learning: An Experiment in Take-Up and Learning
We explore the efficacy of an online after-school tutoring program that complements teacher-provided computer-assisted learning practice. The aim is to scaffold students struggling with online Khan Academy practice at school with low-cost, one-on-one virtual supervision for about an hour a week… more →
The Economics of Age at School Entry: Insights from Evidence and Methods
This article reviews the growing literature on age at school entry and its effects across the life course. Age at school entry affects a broad range of outcomes, including education, labor-market performance, health, social relationships, and family formation. We synthesize the evidence using a… more →
The Long-Term Effects of Rank in Elementary School
We estimate the long-term consequences of math and reading rank within an elementary school on short and long-term outcomes. We find that higher rank leads to better outcomes. Students ranked at the top in grade 7 perform up to 0.33 standard deviations higher on future school exams, are more… more →
Teaching Teachers to Use Computer Assisted Learning Effectively: Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Evidence
Mastery learning – the process by which students must demonstrate proficiency with a single topic before moving on – is well recognized as one of the best ways to learn, yet many teachers struggle or remain unsure about how to implement it into a classroom setting. This study leverages two field… more →
Unintended Consequences of Youth Entrepreneurship Programs: Experimental Evidence from Rwanda
The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda’s entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student… more →
The Importance of a Helping Hand in Education and in Life
This paper discusses the importance of incorporating personal assistance into interventions aimed at improving long-term education and labor market success. While existing research demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of low-touch behavioral nudges, this paper argues that the dynamic nature of… more →
Unequal & Increasingly Unfair: How Federal Policy Creates Disparities in Special Education Funding
The formula used to allocate federal funding for state and local special education programs is one of the Individual with Disabilities Act’s most critical components. The formula not only serves as the primary mechanism for dividing available federal dollars among states, it also represents… more →
Promises and limitations of nudging in education
This article takes stock of where the field of behavioral science applied to education policy seems to be at, which avenues seem promising and which ones seem like dead ends. I present a curated set of studies rather than an exhaustive literature review, categorizing interventions by whether… more →
The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on PreK-12 Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence
Tutoring—defined here as one-on-one or small-group instructional programming by teachers, paraprofessionals, volunteers, or parents—is one of the most versatile and potentially transformative educational tools in use today. Within the past decade, dozens of preK-12 tutoring experiments have been… more →
What Limits College Success? A review and further analysis of Holzer and Baum’s ‘Making College Work’
Holzer and Baum’s recent book, ‘Making College Work: Pathways to Success for Disadvantaged Students,’ provides an excellent up-to-date review of higher education. My review first summarizes its key themes: 1) who gains from college and why?
The Remarkable Unresponsiveness of College Students to Nudging And What We Can Learn from It
We present results from a five-year effort to design promising online and text-message interventions to improve college achievement through several distinct channels. From a sample of nearly 25,000 students across three different campuses, we find some improvement from coaching-based… more →