Abstract Programs and policies in education overwhelmingly focus on improving the average academic achievement for students. However, educational interventions focused on literacy improvement can impact readers at different levels of the reading score distribution differently, and the distributional differences may be more pronounced by sex. In this paper, I explore data from a field experiment in a district in Rwanda that was intended to make classroom reading pedagogy more effective and engage students, families, and communities in reading activities outside of school to improve students’ reading outcomes. I study the distributional effects of the intervention on students on two higher-order reading outcomes – Kinyarwanda fluency and Kinyarwanda text comprehension, measured for students who met a basic literacy threshold. I find that a) the set of interventions had a positive and significant, albeit modest effect on students at or above the 25th percentile of the reading distributions b) the program had positive and significant effects on reading outcomes for girls only, and these effects differed along the reading achievement distribution. This work underscores the importance of tailoring programs and policies to the needs of different types of learners.

中文翻译：

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平均与分布效应：来自卢旺达实验的证据

摘要 教育中的计划和政策绝大多数都侧重于提高学生的平均学业成绩。然而，专注于提高读写能力的教育干预会对阅读分数分布的不同层次的读者产生不同的影响，而且这种分布差异可能因性别而更加明显。在本文中，我探索了卢旺达一个地区的实地实验数据，该实验旨在使课堂阅读教学更有效，并使学生、家庭和社区参与校外阅读活动，以提高学生的阅读成果。我研究了干预对学生的两种高阶阅读结果的分布影响——基尼亚卢旺达语流利度和基尼亚卢旺达语文本理解，针对达到基本识字阈值的学生进行测量。我发现 a) 这套干预措施对阅读分布 25% 或以上的学生有积极和显着的影响，尽管影响不大 b) 该计划仅对女孩的阅读结果有积极和显着的影响，这些影响不同沿阅读成绩分布。这项工作强调了根据不同类型学习者的需求定制计划和政策的重要性。