When promising interventions fail: Personalized coaching for teachers in a middle-income country

Improving Early Literacy through Teacher Professional Development: Experimental Evidence from Colombia

“…Some studies found no impacts on student outcomes (Loyalka et al 2019, Zhang et al 2013. Others show that the evaluated interventions were able to produce the intended changes in teacher practices but failed to translate them into higher student achievement (Berlinski & Busso 2017, Carneiro et al 2022)-underscoring the importance of evaluating programs before scaling them up. A third group of papers found that teacher professional development programs that "bundle" similar components to those that were part of the program "Let's All Learn to Read" were effective at improving literacy outcomes in Kenya (Lucas et al 2014, Piper et al 2018, Uganda (Lucas et al 2014, Kerwin & Thornton 2021 and South Africa (Cilliers et al (2020)).…”

How does salient information on economic prospects shape human capital investments?

“…The third contribution to the literature on the effects of school-to-work transition programs of the chapter is that it presents credible null results for a transition program without performance bonuses (e.g., Carneiro et al, 2022;Oswald and Backes-Gellner, 2014). Although, for example, Rodríguez-Planas (2012) and Oswald and Backes-Gellner (2014) argue for performance bonuses for participants, BEB program was designed without any kind of financial rewards for participation.…”