children, including in developing countries. We estimate a separate such function for both cohorts of beneficiaries.<sup>15</sup> Table 16 presents the result of the child development production function as specified in equation (4) for the 4-year-old cohort of beneficiaries. The estimated coefficients for the EDI suggest that project playgroups support physical development of children. Project playgroups also do better than non-project playgroups in developing language and cognitive skills. On the SDQ, we find that participation in project playgroups increases social problems, while participation in non-project playgroups does not appear to have any effect (positive or negative). It thus seems that for this cohort the focus of the project playgroups on developing cognitive skills may have come at the cost of developing social and emotional skills. As expected, primary school participation has a very strong correlation with language and cognitive skills development. This is no surprise, as the kind of classroom setting that is used in kindergartens and primary schools lends itself better for developing cognitive skills. Moreover, these types of education services meet daily for usually around 6 hours per day, while playgroups meet every other day and only for about 2 hours per day.

Table 17 repeats this exercise and presents the result of the child development production function as specified in equation (4) for the younger cohort. The estimated coefficients for the EDI suggest that both project and non-project playgroups support development on multiple domains: physical, socio-emotional and cognitive. On the SDQ, we find that participation in playgroups lowers hyperactivity, peer problems and pro-social behavior problems, while participation in nonproject playgroups increases social conduct problems. Here too, participation in kindergartens has strong effects on children’s development. For this group of children we do not have information on the role of primary schools as most of the children are not yet age-eligible for primary school.

What aspects of the centers might lead to this? Assessments of center quality carried out using the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scales – Revised edition (ECERS-R) would indicate that project playgroups have significantly better physical space and furnishings than nonproject playgroups and receive higher scores on activities and teacher-child interactions (Table 18).<sup>16</sup> Overall this translates to a higher total ECERS-R score for project playgroups than for nonproject playgroups. These differences are not evident in the case of kindergartens. Similarly in terms of training, while shares of trained teachers are similar across the various types of services, only project playgroup teachers receive the 200 hours of training developed specifically under the project. All other available modalities of training in the country are of substantially shorter duration. Combined with the fact that project playgroup teachers typically have fewer years of teaching experience than their non-project counterparts, this suggests that the more in-depth training under the project may have been one of the channels through which impacts manifest. Given the design of this evaluation, however, there is no way to causally establish this claim.

> 15 A critical drawback of this approach is that we are unable to isolate the impact of attending different services at the correct age for that service. Our sample sizes are too small for this approach to work. Thus we are left with correlations that mix together both the effect of attending a particular service and any effects that one’s age when attending a given service may have.

> 16 See Sally Brinkman, Amer Hasan, Haeil Jung, Angela Kinnell, Nozomi Nakajima and Menno Pradhan. Forthcoming. Promoting child development in rural Indonesia: The role of preschool service quality and teacher characteristics.

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