Alejandro Ganimian

Research Focus

Alejandro J. Ganimian aims to understand how to transform the incentives, capacity, and supports of school systems in low- and middle-income countries to address the needs of their rapidly growing and increasingly diverse student populations. He partners with governments and non-profits to embed policies and programs within experiments, featuring innovations in measurement, to advance evidence on how to improve the academic and social-emotional skills of students who are the first in their families to attend school. He studies how to improve children’s preparation for school, support teachers to in large and heterogeneous classes, and encourage principals to allocate resources equitably.

My plans for the fellowship period:

During my fellowship, I will focus on the frontier question at the nexus of development economics, international education, and education policy: how should we reform classroom instruction to address the needs of large and heterogeneous student groups? I hope to study how and why the most effective response to this challenge—differentiated instruction—improves student achievement.

First, I plan to understand the relative contribution of the components of this intervention: assessing students, grouping them within their class based on their test performance, and assigning each group to materials and activities appropriate for its level. I will conduct a randomized evaluation to compare the effect of combinations of these components to those of the full bundle. I want to learn whether I can achieve similar results with fewer components. Lowering the effort required to embrace differentiation may improve its take-up, impact, and scale-up
potential.

Next, I plan to identify the mechanisms through which differentiation impacts achievement. I will use baseline measures of teachers’ and students’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to describe regular instruction and endline measures to examine how differentiation affects it. Understanding how each component affects teachers and students could inform variants of this intervention that leverage such mechanisms.

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives?

My project can help economists rethink the role that information plays in guiding instruction and, in so doing, their approach to reforming teaching in low- and middle-income countries. Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that teachers would not try to improve learning unless they faced rewards or punishments. This view led to a focus on accountability, antagonizing teachers, and yielding little change in children’s experiences at school. In prior work, I have found diagnostic information on students’ achievement helps principals and teachers allocate effort and improve learning. This is why I believe that the first step in differentiated instruction—assessing students—may drive its effects. If true, this insight could spur innovation in differentiation and expand its reach, impacting how children in developing settings learn.