Becoming a TEDx Speaker: Developing Non-Cognitive Skills in High School Students

TED Talks have become a distinctive genre of public speaking, recognized for their powerful storytelling and wide influence. With more than 3,500 talks available on the TED website and over 2.5 billion views worldwide, the platform plays a central role in spreading transformative ideas across fields such as science, business, culture, and technology. In recent years, TED expanded its educational reach by launching TED-Ed Clubs, a program for teenagers now active in more than 130 countries (TED-Ed, 2024). The initiative targets students aged 14 to 17 and strengthens communication and related skills through structured training that culminates in student-led TEDx talks. These talks provide a practical platform for students to apply what they learn. Through this school-based initiative, students explore their own interests, shape their perspectives, and deliver talks on topics of their choice. Each cycle concludes with a TED-style conference within the school, where students present to an audience that often extends beyond the classroom through recorded and shared talks. This process amplifies students’ voices and brings their ideas to broader audiences.

Preparing a TED Talk helps students articulate their ideas clearly and confidently. The experience also goes beyond public speaking by empowering young people and giving them a meaningful space to make their voices heard (Mitra, 2004). At the same time, the program fosters creativity, socio-emotional development, and critical thinking. By offering students the chance to practice these skills in an authentic context, TED-Ed Clubs address a gap often left by traditional curricula (Voogt, Erstad, Dede, & Mishra, 2013).

School enrollment in the TED-Ed Clubs program is in principle optional and voluntary. In most cases, one or more teachers take the initiative to bring the program to their students, although principals or school management teams sometimes lead the proposal. Schools also decide when and where the meetings take place. In some cases, the program functions as an extracurricular workshop outside school hours, while in most cases it integrates into a curricular space, such as a specific subject.

For the 2025 edition, we informed teachers during registration that one of the program’s objectives was to evaluate its impact. We randomly assigned schools to participate either in 2025 (treatment group) or in the following year. Those that were randomized to participate the following year are the control groups of this year. Teachers and schools could decide freely and voluntarily whether to participate in both the program and the evaluation.

Each participating school designates a facilitator teacher, who attends a training workshop led by the TED-Ed Clubs team. Using this training and a facilitator’s guide, the program unfolds in three stages: Discover, Build, and Communicate. Each stage includes several meetings with specific exercises designed to promote both personal and collective exploration and creation.

A typical TED-Ed Club includes 8 to 10 meetings, each lasting 60 to 80 minutes, spread over approximately three months. The program concludes within the same school year with a final event in which each participant delivers a short TED-style talk, followed by a closing session devoted to post-event reflection. Each school determines the specific duration and organization of the Club according to its own needs and resources.

2025-05-22

2025-12-31

Student's trust in teachers index, Student's sense of belonging index, Student's self-efficacy index, Student's expected educational attainment, Personal statement score (with subscores for: purpose, organization, creativity/personal voice, reflective outlook and use of examples, writing style), Creative writing score, Essay writing score (with subscores for: alignment with writing prompt, coherence and cohesion, essay structure, narrative resources, lexical complexity and word repetition, readability).

We will conduct a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of the TED-Ed Clubs program on the development of skills and educational outcomes of high school students in public and private schools in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

We will carry out the evaluation in collaboration with the TEDxRíoDeLaPlata team (TED’s Argentine partner), the Ministry of Education of the City of Buenos Aires, and our associated research team. The Ministry of Education has authorized the study and the NGO Ideas Que Transforman (TEDxRíoDeLaPlata) will facilitate school contacts. Teachers in each participating school, under the supervision of the school principal, will serve as evaluation administrators after completing training sessions that we will provide before implementation.

For the study, we randomly assigned schools to treatment or control groups. In the treatment group, teachers receive a training session, pedagogical guides, and implement 8–10 TED-Ed Club meetings during 2025. Students in these schools deliver a final talk at the end of the program.

We pre-registered all interested teachers and schools and invited them to an information session. During this session, we explained the objective of the evaluation and the random assignment process for treatment and control groups. After randomization, we contacted schools assigned to the control group to confirm that they would not implement the program in 2025. As a compensation, we offered them to have priority in the participation of another program to teach teachers to give a TED Talk (although none of them ended up enrolling in this program).

We implemented this procedure across two stages of school enrollment. In May 2025, we conducted the first round of randomization for schools interested in starting the program during the first half of the year. In August 2025, we performed the second round of randomization for schools planning to implement the program during the second half of the year. We randomized schools with stratification to ensure balance across three key dimensions: school management (public or private), school socioeconomic level (above or below the median), and previous experience with TED-Ed Clubs.

We assigned schools to treatment and control groups in a 70/30 ratio. This unbalanced design reflects operational constraints faced by our partner and their priority to reach as many schools as possible with the program. We adjusted our power calculations to account for this distribution.

Because schools can implement the program either as part of their curricular or extracurricular activities, we define the control group in two distinct ways. For schools that would have implemented TED-Ed Clubs within curricular mandatory spaces, we survey students from the pre-registered grade that would have participated if assigned to treatment. For schools that would have implemented the program as an extracurricular and optional workshop, we survey students from the main grade or grades where the facilitator teacher would have run the program, covering all students in those grades.

Not available

Randomization was done in office by a computer with the Stata module randtreat, following the previously mentioned stratification and unbalanced design (70/30 ratio for treatment and control, following operational constraints of our partner NGO). Randomization was done in two rounds: In May 2025, we conducted the first round of randomization for schools interested in starting the program during the first half of the year; in August 2025, we performed the second round of randomization for schools planning to implement the program during the second half of the year.

Randomization was done at the school level, and was stratified across three key dimensions: school management (public or private), school socioeconomic level (above or below the median), and previous experience with TED-Ed Clubs (yes/no).

Yes

177 Schools

Approximately 5300 students. We will know the exact number of students that will be evaluated in each school at the moment of evaluation.

121 schools treatment, 56 schools control.