Primary Outcomes (end points)
We will document the effects of the treatments on the following outcomes categories for students enrolled in the second and fourth year of primary school (aged ~7 and ~9 years old respectively), the final grades of the first two primary school cycles :
1. Students’ school attendance, grade retention and drop-out rates measured by administrative records and/or by schools’ inputs at MGov’s platform;
2. Students’ literacy and numeracy skills, measure through direct assessments;
3. Students’ cognitive performance in tasks aimed at assessing working memory and attention:
• Child visual attention, measured through a stroop-task;
• Child visual working memory, measured through a picture span task.
4. Students’ socio-emotional and self-regulatory skills:
• Child self-reported social-emotional skills, directly assessed through items used in IDELA;
• Child self-reported impulsivity scale.
5. Additional students’ outcomes:
• Child engagement in labor activities, as reported by the child and by the parent, measured through the questionnaire. developed by Dr. Kaja Jasinska and has already been used in Côte d’Ivoire,
• Child self-reported motivation,
• Child self-reported self-esteem,
• Child self-reported mindset (growth or fixed),
• Child self-reported time use.
6. Parents’ outcomes:
• Parent self-reported hypothetical willingness to pay to receive weekly messages about their child’s school life;
• Parent’s involvement in their child’s education, as reported by the parent and the child, in terms of time spent for school-related activities
• Parent self-reported mindset with respect to children (growth or fixed) and failure mindset,
• Parent self-reported expectations, aspirations for their child’s education, and beliefs on the child’s school performance and attendance,
• Parent self-reported mental health,
• Parent self-reported discipline practices,
7. Teachers’ outcomes:
• Teacher self-reported mindset and failure mindset;
• Teacher self-reported motivation;
• Teacher self-reported job satisfaction;
• Teacher’s attendance (measure in three ways: (i) self-reported, (ii) reported by the students, and (iii) as reported by administrative records and/or by schools’ inputs at MGov’s platforms).
Additionally, we will assess how students’, their parents and teachers‘ baseline characteristics moderate children’s response to the different versions of the program (audio and text), both in terms of outcomes measured by administrative records (grade retention and school attendance), but also their learning outcomes in both academic and behavioral domains.
Since we have several outcome variables for each outcome categories, we will conduct a multiplicity of tests within each category. Estimating separate regressions for each outcome would substantially inflate the probability of false positives above stated significance levels. For this reason, we will build summary measures for each outcome category above, 1 through 7, Following Kling, Liebman and Katz (2007), we will normalize all outcomes to z-scores, and run seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) to compute effect sizes for each summary measure, within outcome category.