Are the Effects of Informational Interventions Driven by Salience?

Bettinger, Eric; Cunha, Nina; Lichand, Guilherme; Madeira, Ricardo

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3633821

Cited by 43 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…In an earlier study, Hurwitz et al (2015) find a positive effect of delivering parental advice via text message on parental engagement in learning activities in early childhood. For older school-age children, Bettinger et al (2020) find a relatively large impact of text nudges on learning in Brazil.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Texting Parents about Early Child Development: Behavioral Changes and Unintended Social Effects

Barrera¹,

Macours²,

Premand³

et al. 2020

Policy Research Working Papers

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The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Texting Parents about Early Child Development: Behavioral Changes and Unintended Social Effects

Barrera¹,

Macours²,

Premand³

et al. 2020

Policy Research Working Papers

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“…Next, how do parents and students respond to changes in teacher effort? Using survey data, we find that nudges make parents more pessimistic about students' grades relative to those in control schools, just as in Bettinger et al (2020), where nudges bring over-optimistic parents' beliefs closer to the ground truth. 6,7 Having said that, their effect size is much larger where teachers are nudged concurrently, consistent with parents becoming too pessimistic about their children's school standing in those schools.…”

mentioning

confidence: 85%

“…7 Different from Bettinger et al (2020), Bergman (2021) and Dizon-Ross (2019), we cannot assess the extent to which parents are more or less accurate about their children's school performance because there is no administrative data on grades in Ivory Coast.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Arm-Wrestling in the Classroom: the Non-Monotonic Effects of Monitoring Teachers

Lichand

Wolf

2020

SSRN Journal

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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 schools where parents are nudged, numeracy and literacy test scores improve by an additional school quarter, and student dropouts decrease by over 50%. In contrast, in schools where both are nudged, there is no effect on either learning outcomes or dropouts -even though the latter also fall by nearly 50% where teachers are nudged alone. In those schools, teachers show up less frequently, allocate less time to career development, and target instruction to top students to a greater extent than in schools where only parents are nudged. Monitoring backfires precisely for teachers who were most motivated at baseline, consistent with monitoring intensity eventually crowding out intrinsic motivation. Our results have implications for the design of accountability programs above and beyond education.

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“…In this context, Bettinger et al (2021) is evaluating the impacts of several versions of the growth mindset intervention (Yeager, 2019;Bettinger et al, 2018) via text messages to students and their caregivers. The experiment tries to decompose the original intervention into its underlying economic parameters in trying to single out what are the key drivers of its impacts on educational outcomes (if any).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%