Seminar by Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay (Indian Statistical Institute)

 Recent literature on human capital finds that higher order cognitive skills and non-cognitive factors  matter for the economic lives of people. In this paper, we explore whether such skills can be improved among school children in a low capacity institutional setting through a third party initiative that complements existing curriculum and pedagogy with ‘experiential learning’- a discovery based pedagogical approach that is `transported’ to rural settings through portable science labs. Using a randomized control design among 11,000 students in 132 middle schools in rural Uttar Pradesh, we show that such complementary learning can lead to an overall increase in important dimensions of higher order cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills. Moreover, our results show that the perceived trade-off in discovery based pedagogy and achieving higher exam scores, that parents and teachers often care about, does not exist as the intervention increases scholastic scores of students in all subjects.