Experimental Design
The study will work with 39 schools in two districts (Machinga and Balaka) in Malawi. Schools will be selected randomly from the universe of primary schools, oversampling schools with high and low expected levels of parent education to increase heterogeneity in parent education within the sample. Since one of the outcomes to be examined is inter-sibling tradeoffs, multiple-sibling households will be used as the sampling frame.
Based on the test score data from schools and sibling data, a sample of households with at least two children enrolled in grades 2-6 with test score data will be drawn. For households with more than two children, two will be randomly selected.
I will randomly assign half the households in the sample to a treatment group that receives information about children’s test scores, and half to a control group, which will not. Note that half the treatment groups will also be assigned to receive an add-on intervention designed to test a hypothesis intended for another study: that providing more detailed information would increase parental engagement, as measured through monetary and non-monetary investments. This group will receive additional skill information (e.g. whether child can add 3-digit numbers). In my primary analysis, I will ignore the add-on treatment and pool the treatment households. The randomization will be stratified on a test score measure (between sibling score gap) and a proxy for parent education (estimated literacy rate in household’s village).