Randomized Educational Interventions on Social Interactions and Incentives in the Classroom Environment

Intervention 1 (Cooperation): This intervention aims to induce cooperative interactions among students through teamwork, within a novel program where children learn how to code.

Intervention 2 (Competition): This intervention induces a learning/performance environment that involves competitive elements, again within a novel coding program.

Intervention 3 (Individual Coding): In this intervention, children learn coding individually, without structured cooperative or competitive interactions/incentives.

Pure Control: This is a group of schools where no external program is implemented (the policy-relevant control group in the Turkish educational setting).

The interventions are implemented in-class, by external instructors trained extensively by the research team, in a large sample of 4th graders in public elementary schools in Istanbul, Turkey.

2022-09-26

2022-12-31

The larger RCT embeds three different interventions. The outcome variables hypothesized to be affected partially differ for the three different interventions.

In terms of methodology, outcome variables to be collected can be grouped under the following categories: 1) Outcomes measured by incentivized behavioral tasks, 2) Outcomes measured by self-reports, 3) Outcomes measured by objective tests administered by the research team, 4) Administrative data (e.g. school grades, behavioral conduct), 5) Data coming from teacher surveys.

Below are the primary outcomes associated with each intervention.

Intervention 1 (Cooperation): Primary outcome measures are cooperative behavior, in-group and out-group altruism, beliefs about/attitudes toward out-groups (over gender and refugee status), friendship networks, willingness to compete and gender differences therein, classroom cohesion level, behavioral conduct at school, learning outcomes from the coding program, performance in math, behavior in groups (leadership, power).

Intervention 2 (Competition): Primary outcome measures are willingness to compete and gender differences therein, beliefs about/attitudes towards out-groups, friendship networks (over gender), learning outcomes from the coding program, performance in math, gender-related behavior in groups (leadership, power).

Intervention 3 (Individual Coding): Cognitive skills, algorithmic thinking, strategic thinking, performance in math, creativity, self-confidence in math, occupational/STEM aspirations, learning outcomes from the coding program.

Details of these measurements, several of which will involve the design of novel behavioral tasks, are to be provided in the pre-analysis plans for each intervention.

Note that the measures described for each intervention are to be collected in all four groups, since the two distinct interventions (coding with cooperation and competition) share the individual coding and pure control groups as control. However, the interventions target different types of behavior, and hence give rise to partly different hypotheses in terms of expected effects on behavior (described in the pre-analysis plans). For example, while all coding interventions are hypothesized to improve algorithmic thinking and STEM aspirations, only the cooperative intervention is hypothesized to improve prosociality.

Data on some variables will be collected to put forward data for mechanisms for treatment effects and for heterogeneity. For the intervention with competition, these include self-confidence, social confidence, survey measures of attitudes towards and response to competition (e.g. how relaxed one is in competitive environments), and a behavioral measure of risk attitude. For the intervention on teamwork, these include self-confidence, empathy, social confidence, how well the teams interacted/worked together, and attitudes towards responsibility. The pass-through of attitudes and peer effects (e.g. on competitiveness and grit) across the different types of curricula will be studied as a separate research question, and related variables will be collected (to be described in pre-analysis plan).

We have 35 schools in each treatment cell: competition, cooperation, and individual, and 35 in control; a total of 140 schools. In each school, we have three classrooms in the program, randomly selected out of the classrooms that satisfy pre-established criteria as regards class size and the number of refugee students. Every classroom in the same school receives the same treatment (cooperation, competition, or individual coding). Baseline data were collected from the schools in our sample in May-June 2022.

Not available

Randomization was done in office by a computer.

The unit of randomization is the school.

Yes

140 schools.

The number of students officially registered in the rosters received at the time of study plan was 14512.

35 schools in coding with cooperation, 35 schools in coding with competition, 35 schools in coding-individual, 35 schools in pure control.