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Teacher absenteeism and shirking are common problems in developing countries. While monitoring teachers should ameliorate those problems, mobilizing parents to do so often leads to small or even negative effects on learning outcomes. This paper provides causal evidence that this might result from non-monotonic effects of monitoring teachers. Cross-randomizing nudges to teachers and parents in Ivory Coast – to motivate and monitor teachers directly, and to mobilize parents –, we find that, in...
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The impacts of COVID-19 reach far beyond the hundreds of lives lost to the disease; in particular, the pre-existing learning crisis is expected to be magnified during school shutdown. Despite efforts to put distance learning strategies in place, the threat of student dropouts, especially among adolescents, looms as a major concern. Are interventions to motivate adolescents to stay in school effective amidst the pandemic? Here we show that, in Brazil, nudges via text messages to high-school...
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Whether SMS-based nudge interventions can increase parent engagement and improve child learning outcomes across diverse contexts such as rural West Africa is unknown. We conducted a school-randomized trial to test the impacts of an audio or text-message intervention (two messages per week for one school year) to parents and teachers of second and fourth grade students (N = 100 schools, 2246 students) in Cote d’Ivoire. Schools were randomly assigned to have messages sent to (i) parents only,...
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Using a cluster-randomized control trial with 18, 256 high-school students across 87 schools in the State of Goiás, Brazil, this paper documents that behavioral nudges, sent through text messages to students or their caregivers during remote learning in the context of COVID-19, significantly increased test scores in a standardized assessment test conducted with high-school seniors on the following year. Impacts were positive across the entire test score distribution, but nudges increased...
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Behavioral nudges have been shown to increase student attendance and grades across a variety of settings. In low- and middle-income countries, these effects are often mediated by parents showing up in school to a greater extent, ultimately monitoring teachers more closely. As such, could nudges improve educational outcomes even under remote learning? In particular, could they prevent at least part of the dramatic learning losses in the context of COVID-19, which left billions of children...
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Did the dramatic learning losses from remote learning in the context of COVID-19 stem at least partly from schools having overlooked students’ socio-emotional skills – such as their ability to self-regulate emotions, their mental models, motivation, and grit – during the emergency transition to remote learning? We study this question using a cluster-randomized control trial with 18, 256 high-school students across 87 schools in the State of Goiás, Brazil. The intervention sent behavioral...
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Informational interventions have been shown to significantly change behavior across a variety of settings. Is that because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction? Or, alternatively, is it to a large extent because they increase the salience of the decision they target, affecting behavior even in the absence of inputs for belief updating? We study this question in the context of an informational intervention with school parents in Brazil. We randomly assign parents...
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The transition to remote learning in the context of COVID-19 might have led to dramatic setbacks in education. Taking advantage of the fact that São Paulo State featured in-person classes for most of the first school quarter of 2020, but not thereafter, we estimate the effects of remote learning in secondary education using a differences-in-differences strategy that contrasts variation in students’ outcomes across different school quarters, before and during the pandemic. We also estimate...