Teacher Evidence Explorer

Top-line patterns across this evidence base

If you scroll the full list, a few patterns emerge clearly:

• Pedagogy interventions (TaRL, structured pedagogy, scripted lessons) consistently outperform pure incentive interventions for learning outcomes, at much lower cost.
• Pure teacher pay-for-performance has the weakest evidence in India — Muralidharan & Sundararaman (2011) showed effects, but more replications have shown null or mixed results, especially when scaled. Be skeptical of "just pay better teachers more."
• Cascade teacher training (training the trainer of the trainer) typically loses 60–80% of fidelity by the time it reaches the classroom. Direct training of teachers + ongoing mentoring outperforms cascade by large margins.
• Contract teachers (Para-teachers) show positive learning effects at substantially lower cost than government teachers — but raise serious equity and rights concerns. The evidence here is real and politically uncomfortable; treat it carefully.
• Mentoring + coaching outperforms one-time workshops across nearly every well-designed study. The single most under-funded teacher intervention in India.
• Education technology in classrooms (computer-assisted learning, tablets, adaptive software) shows mixed results — positive when complementing teaching, often null or negative when substituting for it. Mindspark India had clear effects (Muralidharan, Singh, Ganimian 2019); many tablet rollouts have not.
• Multi-grade pedagogy training is one of the most overlooked high-evidence interventions for rural India, where most government primary schools have multi-grade classrooms.

For the deeper methodological discussion behind these findings, see the SEL Evaluation in India deep dive and the MEL flagship course.