Crescer Aprendendo; Impact on Teachers and Parents

Last registered on March 20, 2023
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Crescer Aprendendo; Impact on Teachers and Parents
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0011059
Initial registration date
March 14, 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
March 20, 2023, 3:43 PM EDT

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

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name
Cristine Pinto
Affiliation
Insper
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Vladimir Ponczek
PI Affiliation
Sao Paulo School of Economics, FGV
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Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2023-03-13
End date
2023-12-15
Keywords
Education
Additional Keywords
Early Childhood Program
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
The project will evaluate the Crescer Aprendendo program created and developed by the United Way NGO. It is an early-childhood intervention that teaches parents and teachers important tools to foment children's cognitive and socio-emotional skills. We plan to conduct a pilot randomized control trial to investigate whether the program is capable of changing teachers' and parents' beliefs toward the relevance of the quality the parents spend with their children during early childhood.. Moreover, we plan to analyze whether the program changes parents' time invested in activities to develop kids' abilities. The evaluation will focus four to five year-old children. We developed specific questionnaires to elicit the beliefs and to gather data on parents' time use. The evaluation will be conducted in 20 preschools in Sobral, a municipality in Ceará State in Brazil. We plan to conduct baseline and end line field works at the beginning and the end of 2023 school year, respectively. Ten schools will be randomly selected to implement the program for seven months in 2023. We plan to randomly select two classes in each school and interview the teachers and three parents of children in each class. In the end, we will have a sample of 40 teachers and 120 parents.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Pinto, Cristine and Vladimir Ponczek. 2023. "Crescer Aprendendo; Impact on Teachers and Parents." AEA RCT Registry. March 20. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.11059-1.0
Sponsors & Partners

Sponsors

Partner

Name
United Way Brasil
Type
ngo
URL
https://unitedwaybrasil.org.br/
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Crescer Aprendendo is an early childhood intervention that shows parents how to transform their daily activities into opportunities to develop their kids' abilities. The program last for seven months. First, they transfer the program's technology to the teachers and pedagogical coordinators through training sections at the schools. Then, the teachers and pedagogical coordinators apply the program to the parents through workshops. They start by communicating to the parents the importance of early childhood investments for the formation of the kids; then, they promote activities to show how they can invest time into activities that enhance children's abilities. United Way provides all the material and training during the implementation. United Way also connects with parents through WhatsApp. They send messages about the importance of investing in early childhood education and answer questions about the program.

Intervention Start Date
2023-04-17
Intervention End Date
2023-10-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Teacher's beliefs about the quality of time parents spend with their kids, Parent's beliefs about the quality of time they spend with their kids, Parent's time use with their kids.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Beliefs about the quality of time parents spend with their kids: we will apply an instrument in which parents and teachers need to point out the salary and education of a particular student when she reaches 25 years old under different scenarios. In each situation, the parents will have 4 hours per week to spend with the student, and they split these 4 hours between TV and reading books or playing. We will use the increment in salary and education between two different situations to construct a measure of belief.
Time use: We will construct different measures of time spending by parents in different activities like playing with their kids, reading books, watching TV, playing at the cellphones, etc.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Our sample is 20 schools schools with students between 4 and 5 years of age that did not receive the program in 2022. We will randomly choose ten schools to receive the program in the first semester of 2023 and the other ten schools in the control group. We will do pairwise randomization based on the distance between the schools. On average, each school has 6 classes with 4-5 years old children, 3 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. Each class has, on average, 19 students. Given our budget constraint, we will apply our instrument to a sample of teachers and parents. We will sample two classes per school and do the interviews with the teacher and 3 parents per class. In the end, we will have information on 40 teachers and 120 parents at two points in time, baseline and follow-up.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization done in the office by a computer
Randomization Unit
Schools
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
20 schools
Sample size: planned number of observations
120 parents and 40 teachers
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
10 schools control, 10 school receiving the program
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
In this pilot, we work with a small sample. To detect the minimum detectable effect (MDE) associated with our sample size, we use a cluster power calculation for the parents' sample. Each school represents a cluster. We fix the statistical level at 5%, and the statistical power at 80%. In our analysis, we work with standardized outcomes, estimating all the effects in units of standard deviations. Given that, we consider a variance of one for the outcomes of interest. Considering an intracluster correlation of 0,05, we will be able to detect an effect of 0,46, which is a large effect.
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Comitê de Ética em Pesquisa do Insper
IRB Approval Date
2023-02-16
IRB Approval Number
275/2023
Analysis Plan