Informing students of their potential ability: Experimental evidence on motivation, effort and school performance

Students assigned to the treatment group will complete a 60-minute exercise in which they will read a brief text and write a short letter. This is the strategy employed in previous evaluations of this intervention to ensure that any differences across experimental groups is not attributable to the fact that they are doing an exercise, but rather to its content.
The text that treatment students will read will be adapted and translated into Spanish from the original text written by Paunesku et al. (2015). The text begins arguing that the brain is like a muscle; the more it is used, the stronger it gets. Then, it explains two concepts that
are key to understand the neuroscience behind this statement (the cerebral cortex and the neuron) and the process by which the brain develops with experience (neural connections). Next, it summarizes supporting evidence from research on animals and children’s brain
growth. Finally, it discusses the implications of this research for the reader. The article features pictures and figures to illustrate key concepts and keep the reader engaged. I plan to incorporate some of the improvements to the text that have been recently evaluated
experimentally by the original developers in the U.S. (Yeager et al. 2016).
After reading the text, students will be asked to write a letter to a friend or relative of their choice to tell them what they learned from the article and how it may help them. This has been a key component of interventions of this kind to encourage students to internalize the main messages from the texts (Aronson 1999; Aronson et al. 2002; Walton 2014).
All letters were hanged on the walls of the classroom around a poster to remind students of the activity for the rest of the school year.

2017-09-04

2017-09-18

academic performance in math, language, social science and natural science

perceived difficulty of schoolwork, student effort, perceived usefulness of assessments, bullying at school

The sample for the study includes 202 public secondary schools located in urban and semi-urban areas of Salta, Argentina. Out of all 334 secondary schools in Salta, I excluded a) al 94 private schools (because I was interested in the potential of the intervention to impact public schools); b) all 26 public schools in rural areas (for logistical reasons); and c) 12 public schools in urban and semi-urban areas with fewer than 10 students in grade 12 (to minimize sampling error from small schools).
I randomly assigned the 202 sampled schools to one of two experimental groups, a treatment group that offered the intervention, and a control group that was not offered the intervention.
The data used to analyze the intervention comes from 4 sources: 1) student achievement on the national census-based assessment of math, reading, natural sciences and social sciences; 2) student complementary questionnaires from that same national assessment; 3) a spreadsheet confirming the implementation of the intervention in each classroom (the information from this spreadsheet comes from the pictures of the poster with the letter that the implementers of the intervention took after finishing the intervention); 4) internal efficiency data from the national census conducted in 2015 (to check balance).

Randomization done in office by a computer using Stata

Public secondary schools

Yes

202 public secondary schools

14,000 students

102 treatment schools and 100 control schools