The Impact of Providing Vision Screening and Free Eyeglasses on Academic Outcomes - Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Title I Elementary Schools in Florida

Title I elementary schools across three large central Florida school districts (multi-armed RCT; participant count not stated in abstract)

Elementary students in Title I (high-poverty) schools, central Florida, United States

Multi-armed RCT separating two distinct treatments that policy usually bundles: (a) enhanced vision screening alone, and (b) screening plus free eye exams and free eyeglasses. Outcome is the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test, an independent state accountability assessment - one of the few genuinely standardized, non-researcher-designed measures in this topic. Effects are reported averaged over ALL students including those without vision problems, so the effect on treated children with uncorrected refractive error is necessarily larger than the headline. Graded B rather than A because it is a single unreplicated trial and the abstract reports pass-rate percentage points rather than effect sizes.

Providing additional or enhanced screening ALONE was generally insufficient to improve achievement in math or reading - the null that matters most for policy, since screening is the cheap half and the one schools already do. Screening plus free eye exams plus free eyeglasses raised the probability of passing the FCAT in reading and math by approximately 2.0 percentage points averaged over all students. The authors present evidence that this impact FADES OUT over time and state that follow-up actions after the intervention may be necessary to sustain the gains.

Low. Randomized assignment within Title I schools; the screening-only arm additionally functions as an active control that isolates the correction itself from the attention and identification effects of being screened.