I was just imagining a mozzarella + tomato sandwich, maybe with some prosciutto.

We’re a v collegial dept, good in multiple fields: applied micro, macro, Dev, theory, behavioural...

See e.g. @toreellingsen.bsky.social @robertostling.bsky.social @martinabjorkman.bsky.social @jmerilainen.bsky.social

Lots of seminars, an excellent PhD program (run across the Stockholm depts)

My Swedish skills are still rubbish but I can read a bit. And Danish is basically looks like misspelled Swedish :)

You working on Danish schools, Josh?

We can't say definitively (no center-based data).

Likely: low time use on cognition. Pub preschools are under-resourced, a single AWC worker expected to work miracles!

This *can* be fixed (as we show for COVID-19 remediation in the same state elsewhere)

jhr.uwpress.org/content/earl...

Not on human rights or democracy, for sure. But, for skilled workers, moving to Dubai or Singapore is often more attractive than Europe. It’s easier for companies to expand, salaries are higher, taxes/COL lower etc.

EU has many natural advantages for attracting talent but little joined up strategy

That, sadly, is only one of the things that are wild about 2025…

No randomly assigned diff in dosage. Some externally induced through implementation changes which we evaluate with observational methods in Year 3 of the program.

The dose response survives school FE, grade FE, attendance, lagged achievement etc. pretty well

In first ppr, we also validated w/ IV

@woessmann.bsky.social @deonfilmer.bsky.social @matthewakraft.com @andydebarros.bsky.social

Big picture: `science of scaling’ matters enormously for welfare.

Unlike medicine, social programs need iterative adaptation & testing beyond finding "what works" in small pilots.

Without this, as
@johnlist.bsky.social
notes, “we are performing efficacy tests on steroids”. 16/16"

These results also matter for rich countries.

High-dosage tutoring has been found to be very effective but has been hard to scale since good tutors are scarce, and costly.

PAL could make personalized tutoring feasible at scale. 15/16

These results matter beyond India.

Most LMICs face a “learning crisis”, and have large numbers of students below grade-level standards.

Middle-school years are especially challenging with few evidence-backed scalable ideas.

Our results offer a promising way forward. 14/16

Implementation protocols developed/tested in this study have *already* informed policy at scale (+ other EdTech initiatives).

Mindspark is now operational in over 2200 public schools in 13 Indian states covering >260k students.

Further scale-ups currently in the works. 13/16

Why is this a big deal?

Governments spend billions on hardware, but evidence shows hardware alone ≠ learning.

What matters is thoughtful integration of PAL software into classrooms.

Our study shows how to make EdTech actually work in public schools. 12/16

A key result is that the "dose-response" relationship between time spent on the platform and learning gains is linear and constant over time.

Thus, monitoring usage is a low-cost way to track and improve implementation quality at scale 11/16

One disappointment: we find no gains on school exams.

Students were so far behind that even large gains didn’t show up on grade-level tests.

Highlights trade-off between teaching “at the right level” vs “at the curricular level,” and the value of early remediation. 10/16

This model was 2x as cost-effective as the original study because: (a) hardware was used more intensely, and (b) many inputs were already present in schools

Program was 1.5 to 4x more cost-effective than default spending patterns.

Costs should reduce further over time. 9/16