IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/i4rdps/214.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

"Try to Balance the Baseline": A Comment on "Parent-Teacher Meetings and Student Outcomes: Evidence from a Developing Country" by Islam (2019)

Author

Listed:
  • Bonander, Carl
  • Hammar, Olle
  • Jakobsson, Niklas
  • Bensch, Gunther
  • Holzmeister, Felix
  • Brodeur, Abel

Abstract

Islam (2019) reports results from a randomized field experiment in Bangladesh that examines the effects of parent-teacher meetings on student test scores in primary schools. The reported findings suggest strong positive effects across multiple subjects. In this report, we demonstrate that the school-level randomization cannot have been conducted as the author claims. Specifically, we show that the nine included Bangladeshi unions all have a share of either 0% or 100% treated or control schools. Additionally, we uncover irregularities in baseline scores, which for the same students and subjects vary systematically across the author's data files in ways that are unique to either the treatment or control group. We also discovered data on two unreported outcomes and data collected from the year before the study began. Results using these data cast further doubt on the validity of the original study. Moreover, in a survey asking parents to evaluate the parent-teacher meetings, we find that parents in the control schools were more positive about this intervention than those in the treated schools. We also find undisclosed connections to two additional RCTs.

Suggested Citation

  • Bonander, Carl & Hammar, Olle & Jakobsson, Niklas & Bensch, Gunther & Holzmeister, Felix & Brodeur, Abel, 2025. ""Try to Balance the Baseline": A Comment on "Parent-Teacher Meetings and Student Outcomes: Evidence from a Developing Country" by Islam (2019)," I4R Discussion Paper Series 214, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:214
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/313402/1/I4R-DP214.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Reproduction; Student outcomes; Field experiments; Bangladesh;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B41 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - Economic Methodology
    • C12 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Hypothesis Testing: General
    • I25 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Economic Development

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:214. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.i4replication.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.