The sample universe is 145 circuits in 20 UNICEF districts. Circuits were to be randomly assigned to the treatment of additional management training, with district as the stratification unit. Additional management circuits required one school and non-management circuits required two schools. Schools within each circuit were chosen using a randomly ordered list of all target schools. Schools were contacted in the order in which they appeared on the list and a screening questionnaire was administered to determine their eligibility for the program. To be eligible for the STARS project, a school must have non-zero enrollment in primary 4, primary 5, and primary 6 classes1, non-shift2 in primary 4-primary 6, and non-multigrade3 in primary 4 through primary 6. Overall, five of the circuits were dropped because they did not have any schools that met the eligibility criteria for inclusion.
The study was then conducted in 210 schools in 140 circuits (groups of schools) across 20 districts in Ghana.
Within each randomly sampled school, 210 head teachers and all P4-P6 teachers (671) were selected. At baseline, 15 students (30 per school) were randomly selected per class (P4 and P5). If a particular class had more than 15 students, only 15 were randomly sampled. If less than 15 students, all students were automatically included. The final sample size is 5,893 students.
