Telementoring and Homeschooling During School Closures: A Randomized Experiment in Rural Bangladesh

Prolonged school closures due to political unrests, teacher strikes, natural disasters, and public health crises can be detrimental to student learning in developing countries. Using a randomized controlled experiment in 200 Bangladeshi villages, we evaluate the impact of over-the-phone mentoring and homeschooling support delivered by volunteers on the learning outcomes of primary school children during school closures caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The telementoring program improved the learning outcomes of treated children by 0.75 SD and increased homeschooling involvement of treated mothers by 0.64 SD. The impacts on learning are driven primarily by the direct mentoring of children and to some extent also by the increased homeschooling involvement of mothers. Academically weaker children and households from relatively lower socioeconomic backgrounds benefitted the most from telementoring. These findings suggest that learning crises in low-resource settings can be addressed by simple and very low-cost technology solutions.