Achievement

Fang He has been involved in several projects, including a PicTalk machine evaluation in Mumbai, India, a Preschool program evaluation in Mumbai, India, Library program evaluation in Bangalore, India, and School feeding and compulsory education program evaluation in Sri Lanka. While the last two projects mentioned have seen great progress in the past year, the PicTalk’s innovative research methods have resulted in interesting findings. Assessing the relative productivity of several modes of implementing an Indian English education curriculum, each consists of a specially designed machine or flash card based activities, the new methods are very effective and, on average, all implementation strategies yield gains of about 0.3 standard deviations in students’ knowledge of English. Weaker students tend to benefit more from interventions that include teacher directed activities while stronger students benefit more from the more self-paced machine-based implementation.