Impact of infrastructural developments on student's learning in Delhi govt. schools

Abstract

Education has consistently been recognized as the cornerstone of development for any country or region and one of the highest return rewarding development activities. Education outcome is influenced by several factors, infrastructure being one of them. School infrastructure, its design, quality, and day to day management is significant in enabling the school system to deliver improved education outcomes. It broadly encompasses land and building, quality of facilities and the overall design. The development of quality school infrastructure requires significant capital investment, which has increased the school's overall cost of construction. Therefore, it is imperative to identify infrastructural parameters that needs focus. The research study was phased into three parts – 1. Conduct clustering to divide the pool of schools into clusters based on similarity of parameters to extrapolate the intermittently missing pass percentage data for same clusters of schools. This was to increase the number of schools to be analyzed. 2. Allocate Infrastructure index or score to schools based on 13 significant infrastructural parameters that impact overall school performance, the objective of the activity was to split a dataset into control (420 schools) & treatment (407) group. 3. Run differences in differences to run the regression analysis using two methods. The First method focused to assessing impact on passing percentage of treatment & control group by comparing pre & post period. The second Method assesses the impact on the passing percentage of infrastructural development by comparing pre & post period. The study results indicate a linkage between the pass percentage outcomes and infrastructural changes that took place post 2015 for the performance outcomes for class X. For class XII, however, performance outcomes do not show linkage to government schools' infrastructural changes.