The paper examines the effect of social identity on adult learning within a hierarchical social setting— an important yet often understudied issue for effective adult education. We leverage the random matching of students and teachers from a randomized controlled experiment in India, where illiterate adult female learners aged 18–45 were randomly assigned to a literacy program. We find a positive and significant impact of matching an upper caste teacher with a lower caste adult student on literacy scores. We also find suggestive evidence of an increase in students' confidence measures when matched with an upper caste teacher, indicating a plausible impact mechanism. Our findings highlight the need for future research on social identity and its influence on adult learning, particularly in countries with existing deep-rooted hierarchical social constructs.

中文翻译：

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社会认同与学习：印度成人扫盲计划

本文研究了等级社会环境中社会身份对成人学习的影响——对于有效的成人教育来说，这是一个重要但经常被忽视的问题。我们利用印度一项随机对照实验中学生和教师的随机匹配，其中 18-45 岁的文盲成年女性学习者被随机分配到一个扫盲计划。我们发现将高种姓教师与低种姓成人学生匹配对识字成绩有积极而显着的影响。我们还发现了暗示性证据，表明与高种姓教师配合时，学生的信心会有所提高，这表明存在合理的影响机制。我们的研究结果强调了未来研究社会身份及其对成人学习的影响的必要性，特别是在现有根深蒂固的等级社会结构的国家。