
“World Bank researchers recently published the results of an AI tutoring trial in Nigeria. It was an incredible success: the students learned more in the six-week program than they would have otherwise learned in two years. And this was measured using a pen-and-paper exam, so the kids weren’t just faking it with ChatGPT,” notes The Doomslayer.
The World Bank adds that the
benefits extended beyond the scope of the program itself. Students who participated also performed better on their end-of-year curricular exams. These exams, part of the regular school program, covered topics well beyond those addressed in the six-week intervention. This suggests that students who learned to engage effectively with AI may have leveraged these skills to explore and master other topics independently.
Moreover, the program benefited all students, not just the highest achievers. Girls, who were initially lagging boys in performance, seemed to gain even more from the intervention, highlighting its potential to bridge gender gaps in learning.
Nigerian schools are often quite bad, although they have improved somewhat over the past decade. A decade ago, most Nigerian middle-school students could not basic arithmetic, such as adding 11+7.
African educational systems have improved somewhat since then thanks to innovators like NewGlobe Schools. As Peter Coy explained in the New York Times:
Some of the world’s most successful educational techniques are being applied today in Kenya, Uganda, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda and India, in schools serving poor children that are run or advised by NewGlobe Schools, a company founded by Americans with headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. These techniques deserve to be applied more widely, including in wealthy nations such as the United States.
A new study led by a Nobel laureate economist, Michael Kremer of the University of Chicago, found that in Kenya, enrolling in schools run by NewGlobe for two years increased test scores by an amount equal to being in school for an additional 0.89 year for primary school pupils, and to being in school an extra 1.48 years for pre-primary pupils. The poorest children improved the most.
“The test score effects in this study are among the largest observed in the international education literature, particularly for a program that was already operating at scale, exceeding the 99th percentile of treatment effects of large-scale education interventions,” Kremer and his colleagues found.
NewGlobe clearly has built a better mousetrap, but it has taken a while for the world to beat a path to its door. It has encountered multiple obstacles, including from the U.S. Congress, although it is gradually winning followers.
One reason for the slow uptake in the early going was resistance from teacher unions, including the Kenyan National Union of Teachers….Students in Bridge International Academies, as NewGlobe’s schools in Kenya are called, routinely outperformed students in the public schools, the researchers found. To be sure, that was not a high hurdle: The Kremer paper cites other research finding that “Kenyan teachers were absent from class during 47 percent of unannounced visits and spent about two hours and 20 minutes a day teaching.”