The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Philip Oreopoulos (University of Toronto) for this session.
Philip Oreopoulos is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and serves as an editor at the Journal of Labor Economics. His current work focuses on education policy, particularly the application of behavioral economics to education and child development, often using large-scale field experiments to generate rigorous evidence for public policy decisions.
Event Topic:
How In-School Supervised Ed-Tech Support Produces Massive Learning Gains: A Khan Academy Field Experiment in India
with Oliver Keyes-Krysakowski & Deepak Agarwal
Computer-assisted learning (CAL) platforms frequently underperform at scale not because the technology is ineffective, but because schools face substantial implementation frictions: teachers and administrators must overcome initial technical hurdles, reorganize instructional routines, manage competing scheduling pressures, and do so while uncertain about the technology’s effectiveness—conditions that often lead to low and unproductive student engagement. This study explores whether strengthening implementation structure can raise both the quantity and quality of CAL usage in 83 residential government middle schools in Uttar Pradesh, India, and, in turn, learning gains. All schools had access to Khan Academy, but randomly selected treatment schools received on-the-ground lab-in-charges whose sole responsibility was to ensure high-fidelity implementation by securing reliable connectivity, simplifying student rostering, protecting weekly practice time, supervising in-class use, coordinating content with teachers, and monitoring progress. The intervention increased platform usage from 7.2 to 47.4 minutes per week. Mathematics achievement rose by almost half a standard deviation over 31 weeks, with gains broad-based across achievement levels and question difficulty. These results show that the central constraint on effective and scalable CAL is not technology or content, but the presence of organizational structures that ensure sustained, productive instructional use.
Event Details:
Date: 27 February 2026
Time: 14:00–15:15
Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.
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