Beliefs about future educational achievements

We know from the baseline survey in the main study, and from previous work, that students have very optimistic beliefs about their chances of success. We want to test in this trial if this optimism can be explained by a lack of information about the objective success rates.

Specifically, we give the following information to the treated students and not to the control students:

“Last year, xx form IV students from your school took the final exam (CSEE). Of those xx students, zz received division I, II or III whereas yy received division IV or 0.”

Where xx, zz and yy are pre-programmed for each school using the results from 2022 and obtained from the National Examinations Council of Tanzania.

2023-09-04

2023-09-15

1. Expectations about themselves: “Are you more likely to receive (i) Division I, II or III, or (ii) Division IV or 0?”
2. Expectations about others: “This year, there are about ww form IV students in your school. How many of these do you think will receive Division I, II or III?” (where ww is pre-programmed by school)

In addition to these main outcomes, we included in the survey other ways to measure the students’ expectations and we will also in a more exploratory way, analyze the treatment effect on these additional measures:
“What is the most likely division you expect to receive at the exam?”
and
“Imagine 100 students that are like you in a school similar to yours. How many do you think will receive division I, II or III? (answer a number between 0 and 100)
a) Out of these [ANSWER TO 3.] students, how many will receive division I?
b) Out of these [ANSWER TO 3.] students, how many will receive division II?
c) Out of these [ANSWER TO 3.] students, how many will receive division III?”

We will also measure the treatment effects on secondary outcomes that we also measure in our survey, including:
1) What is the maximum level of education you aspire to attain?
2) Now thinking not only of what you aspire, but also about what might happen in reality, what is the maximum level of education you will most likely have in the end of your education pathway?
3) If you were to have a child, at what age would you aspire to have your first child?
4) Think about what might happen in reality, if you were to have a child what do you think is the most likely age you will have when getting your first child?

This trial takes place within a larger study about Tanzanian student’s transition out of school. More information about the study can be found in a separate plan. In the trial study, we worked with 50 schools from two regions of Tanzania and recruited about 2,800 students. In half of the schools we introduced a new curriculum in the form of podcasts. These students form the population of interest for this trial. We expect to reach at least 85% of the target population.

The survey, and the information treatment embedded in the survey, is happening in September 2023, while the students are still in Form IV and a few months before they take the final exam, the Certificate of Secondary Education Examination. The information treatement is provided on the phone and randomized at the individual level.

randomization done in office by a computer

student

No

not clustered

target of 1400 students. we expect to reach 85% of them.

600 per arm

with 600 observations per arm, we can detect a .16sd change in the outcom at teh 5% level of significance and 80% level of power.