The STRIPES Trial - Support to Rural India's Public Education System

Background Performance of primary school students in India lags far below government expectations, and major disparity exists between rural and urban areas. The Naandi Foundation has designed and implemented a programme using community members to deliver after-school academic support for children in over 1,100 schools in five Indian states. Assessments to date suggest that it might have a substantial effect. This trial aims to evaluate the impact of this programme in villages of rural Andhra Pradesh and will compare test scores for children in three arms: a control and two intervention arms. In both intervention arms additional after-school instruction and learning materials will be offered to all eligible children and in one arm girls will also receive an additional 'kit' with a uniform and clothes. Methods/Design The trial is a cluster-randomised controlled trial conducted in conjunction with the CHAMPION trial. In the CHAMPION trial 464 villages were randomised so that half receive health interventions aiming to reduce neonatal mortality. STRIPES will be introduced in those CHAMPION villages which have a public primary school attended by at least 15 students at the time of a baseline test in 2008. 214 villages of the 464 were found to fulfil above criteria, 107 belonging to the control and 107 to the intervention arm of the CHAMPION trial. These latter 107 villages will serve as control villages in the STRIPES trial. A further randomisation will be carried out within the 107 STRIPES intervention villages allocating half to receive an additional kit for girls on the top of the instruction and learning materials. The primary outcome of the trial is a composite maths and language test score. Discussion The study is designed to measure (i) whether the educational intervention affects the exam score of children compared to the control arm, (ii) if the exam scores of girls who receive the additional kit are different from those of girls living in the other STRIPES intervention arm. One of the goals of the STRIPES trial is to provide benefit to the controls of the CHAMPION trial. We will also conduct a cost-benefit analysis in which we calculate the programme cost for 0.1 standard deviation improvement for both intervention arms

A Multiple-Domain Evaluation of Stratified Case-Based Reasoning

. Stratified case-based reasoning (SCBR) is a technique in which case abstractions are used to assist case retrieval, matching, and adaptation. Previous work has shown that SCBR can significantly decrease the computational expense required for retrieval, matching, and adaptation under a variety of different problem conditions. This paper extends this work to two new domains: a problem in combinatorial optimization, sorting by prefix reversal; and logistics planning. An empirical evaluation in the prefix-reversal problem showed that SCBR reduced search cost, but severely degraded solution quality. By contrast, in logistics planning, use of SCBR as an indexing mechanism led to faster solution times and permitted more problems to be solved than either hierarchical problem solving (by ALPINE) or ground level CBR (by SPA) alone. The primary factor responsible for the difference in SCBR's performance in these two domains appeared to be that the optimal-case utility was low in the prefix-reve..