PUBLICATIONS

What is a Good School, and Can Parents Tell? Evidence on the Multidimensionality of School Output

with Diether W. Beuermann, C. Kirabo Jackson, and Francisco Pardo

The Review of Economic Studies, vol. 90(1), pp 65–101. January 2023.

Published article (Open access)

Media: VoxDev, Caribbean Dev Trends (IDB), Nada es Gratis (Spanish)

To explore whether schools’ causal impacts on test scores measure their overall impact on students, we exploit plausibly exogenous school assignments and data from Trinidad and Tobago to estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. Schools’ impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on important outcomes such as arrests, dropout, teen motherhood, and formal labour market participation. To examine if parents’ school preferences are related to these causal impacts, we link them to parents’ ranked lists of schools and employ discrete-choice models to infer preferences for schools. Parents choose schools that improve high-stakes tests even conditional on peer quality and average outcomes. Parents also choose schools that reduce criminality and teen motherhood and increase labour market participation. School choices among parents of low-achieving students are relatively more strongly related to schools’ impacts on non-test-score outcomes, while the opposite is true for parents of high-achieving students. These results suggest that evaluations based solely on test scores may be misleading about the benefits of school choice (particularly for low-achieving students), and education interventions more broadly.

WORKING PAPERS

Broadcasting Education at Scale: Long-Term Labor Market Impacts of Television-Based Schools 

with Raissa Fabregas

Submitted

[NEW!] July 2024: Latest version

This paper examines the long-term impacts of using information and communication technologies to scale up last-mile educational services. We exploit geographic variation and cohort exposure from 1980 to 2000 to Mexico's TV-schools--lower secondary schools that substitute on-site specialized teachers with televised lectures, serving over 1.4 million children annually. Cohorts in high TV-school construction areas are 8 percentage points more likely to graduate lower secondary, with increases of 0.4 years of education and 8% in hourly earnings. Labor market returns are comparable to those from standard schools. Impacts are primarily driven by out-of-school children, with higher earning gains in urbanized areas.

Note: This paper is the result of combining two independent papers: "Secondary Schools with Televised Lessons: The Labor Market Returns of the Mexican Telesecundaria" (Navarro-Sola, 2021), and "Broadcasting Human Capital? The Long-Term Effects of Mexico's Telesecundarias" (Fabregas, 2021). This paper supersedes all prior versions.

Lowering Barriers to Remote Education: Experimental Impacts on Parental Responses and Learning

with Emily Beam and Priya Mukherjee

Submitted

[UPDATED!] July 2024: Latest version. Older versions: IZA Discussion Paper No. 15596,  HCEO Working Paper 2022-030

We conducted a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh during the COVID-19 school closures to investigate how parents adjusted their educational investments in response to three interventions: information about an educational technology tool, an internet data package, and one-on-one phone support. None of the interventions directly improved student learning. However, they affected parental time and monetary investments in education, and some changes contributed to learning gains. Specifically, receiving the edtech information did not affect its uptake but increased tutoring investments, driving improvements in math achievement. The data package led to more modest increases in tutoring investments, while phone-based support reduced tutoring.

SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS

The Impact of Formative Assessment of Behavior-Based Socioemotional Skills on Students' Outcomes

with Caterina Calsamiglia, Giacomo de Giorgi, and Ece Yagman

Data collection completed. Analysis stage.

It is widely recognized that social and personal skills (i.e., perseverance, motivation, teamwork, etc.) are highly predictive of life achievements and long-term well-being, such as lower levels of school dropout, physical and mental health issues, and conflict. It is also well established that a comprehensive integration of these non-cognitive skills in the educational curriculum is essential to make lifetime progress. The objective of this trial is to test the causal impact of training and mentoring teachers to integrate formative assessment of socioemotional skills in the classroom with the help of digital tools on students’ academic and non-cognitive outcomes. Formative assessment implemented by the trained teachers involves the observation, recording, and provision of feedback on a specific set of behaviors, the so-called Pentabilities, that characterize socioemotional skills in active classroom environments. The teachers are given 5-6 months to implement the intervention. The trial involves 40 Catalan secondary schools that mainly serve at-risk populations.

Improving Labor Market Matching through Soft Skills Development in Technical Education

with Emily Beam, Ricardo Dahis, and Ursula Mello

Full RCT funded. Piloting stage. 

This project addresses the challenge of integrating soft skills into Technical Vocational and Education Training (TVET) programs to improve youth employability and labor market matching in industrial occupations. In partnership with SENAI, Brazil's largest TVET provider, we aim to understand whether technology can enhance the scalability of soft skills development. The intervention is a novel methodology targeting soft skills through behavior-based assessment and feedback provision with the help of digital tools.