Encouraging Government Higher Education Scholarship Application through Motivation and Information Intervention: Randomized Controlled Trial in Indonesia

Last registered on January 23, 2023

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Encouraging Government Higher Education Scholarship Application through Motivation and Information Intervention: Randomized Controlled Trial in Indonesia
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0010763
Initial registration date
January 15, 2023

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
January 23, 2023, 6:37 AM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
Australian National University

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Sebelas Maret University

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2022-08-11
End date
2023-09-30
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
This study investigates how we can encourage high school students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to apply for government scholarships. We conduct this study in 31 high schools in one city in Indonesia. The Indonesian government provides a generous scholarship to university students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This scholarship covers both tuition and living cost for the entire length of the students' study. From previous studies we found that many students who were eligible for the scholarship did not apply for the scholarship. In this study we aim to find out why by testing an intervention that provides motivation and information about the scholarship during the last year of high school. We randomly allocate 1256 economically disadvantaged students to the treatment group and the control group. The intervention involves playing a short motivational and informational video and a question and answer session. We measure students' motivation and knowledge about the scholarship a few weeks after the intervention and we also track whether the students apply for the scholarship by the application deadline of the scholarship.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Dong, Sarah and Tri Mulyaningsih. 2023. "Encouraging Government Higher Education Scholarship Application through Motivation and Information Intervention: Randomized Controlled Trial in Indonesia." AEA RCT Registry. January 23. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.10763-1.0
Sponsors & Partners

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
The intervention is an information session held in person at the high school the student attends. A teacher from the high school will collect students in the treatment group in the particular high school and take them to a separate classroom in the school. Once in the room, a zoom session is started and one of the principle investigators of the trial will conduct the online live zoom session from online. She will first play a 11 minutes video with information about the scholarship. The video starts with an introduction of a previous student from a economically disadvantaged background in the same city (role model) who was awarded the scholarship and who had been successful in his/her early career. The role model briefly tells his/her story about his/her family and economic background and how the scholarship helped him/her to complete university and succeed in the job market. Then the role model's voice goes through easy to understand information about the scholarship, mainly on who are eligible to apply and how to apply. After the video is played, a live question and answer session is conducted with all the students. Then the same video with a different role model (of different gender) is played again. The whole session is less than an hour. For 29 high schools, a single zoom session was conducted with students sitting in 29 high schools at the same time on January 12, 2023. Because 2 high schools could not join the original session, two separate but same zoom sessions are conducted on January 16, 2023 and January 17, 2023.
To avoid spillover of the intervention to students in the same high school, the teach and the students cannot watch the video again after the zoom session as they do not have a link to the video. Teachers are also told not to reveal the information covered during the session to students who are not in the treatment group.
Intervention (Hidden)
Intervention Start Date
2023-01-12
Intervention End Date
2023-01-17

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
1. Student's motivation about applying for the scholarship.
2. Student's knowledge about the scholarship.
3. Whether the student apply for the scholarship.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
For outcomes 1 and 2, an intermediate survey will be conducted with students in both control and treatment groups a few weeks after the intervention. The survey has questions about the degree to which the student intends to apply for the scholarship, and questions that evaluate the student's knowledge about the eligibility and application process of the scholarship. Various measures of motivation and knowledge will be constructed from the answers from this survey.
For the third outcome (whether the student apply for the scholarship), the principle investigators will try to find out whether the student has applied for the scholarship through various sources (from the student, school, and government agencies), and will try to verify the information.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
The target population of our trial are high school students in their last year who are eligible for the scholarship. These are students who come from economically disadvantaged background. We are able to convince 31 high schools (most of the high schools) in one major city in Indonesia to participate in our trial. From these high schools, we identified around 1300 students who would be eligible for the scholarship based on information provided by the high schools. We conducted a baseline survey using online survey tools that students can use through their mobile phone with these students. 1281 students completed the survey. Then we did stratified randomization to allocate these 1281 students into one control and one treatment group. We stratified along household head income quartiles, initial intent to apply for any scholarship (low, medium, high), and knowledge about the particular scholarship we provide information on (low, medium, high, very high). The randomization allocates 628 students into control group, and 628 students into treatment group (25 students were dropped either because they were in small strata or because they were misfits in the stratified randomization process). We did not conduct clustered randomization (either at school or class level) because power calculation shows that we would not have enough power if we conducted clustered randomization. We only have one treatment group due to power concerns, too, and as a result we are not able to separate the effect of motivation and the effect of information. We evaluate the effect of these two channels combined.

A few weeks after the intervention is conducted with the treatment group, an intermediate follow up survey will be conducted with both control and treatment group (online survey that can be completed using mobile phone) that evaluates the students' intent to apply for the scholarship and the knowledge about the scholarship (who are eligible, how to apply). We will also track which students apply for the scholarship until the application deadline (August, 2023).

After all the outcome data are collected, we will conduct regression analysis to analyze the effect of the intervention on students' intent to apply for the scholarship, knowledge about the scholarship, and whether the student applies for the scholarship.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Randomization is done in office using Stata based on the baseline data we collected. Stratified randomization is conducted. We first analyze the relationship between the intent to apply for any scholarship/knowledge about the particular scholarship we provide information on and family characteristics, student characteristics, and high school fixed effects. We find that the intent to apply for any scholarship/knowledge about the specific scholarship we provide information on is significantly correlated with household head income but not with high school fixed effects. These findings direct us to conduct stratified randomization along household head income quartiles. We also stratify along the intent to apply for any scholarship (low, medium, high) and knowledge about the scholarship our intervention provides information on (low, medium, high, very high) as we anticipate these characteristics to be strongly correlated with our outcome variables. The fact that high school fixed effects are largely not correlated with the intent to apply to any scholarship or with the knowledge about the particular scholarship we provide information on is reassuring for out decision to not cluster our randomization at school level.
Randomization Unit
We randomize at the student level.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
1256
Sample size: planned number of observations
1256
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
628 in treatment group, 628 in control group.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Assuming 50% of students in the control group will apply for the scholarship, and assuming a standard deviation of 0.5 for the outcome whether apply for scholarship, the minimum detectable effect size is 7.9%, i.e., the intervention increases the application rate by 7.9 percentage points. Assume 12% of students in the control group will apply for the scholarship (equal to the percentage who have very high intent to apply to any scholarship at the baseline), and assuming a 0.325 standard deviation, the minimum detectable effect is 5.14%, i.e., the intervention increases the application rate by 5.14 percentage points.
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Research Ethics Committee, Faculty of Medicine Universitas Sebelas Maret
IRB Approval Date
2022-06-30
IRB Approval Number
01/02/06/2022/80

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information

Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials