Intervention (Hidden)
The intervention consists in organizing a set of online meetings with role models for students enrolled in their second year of middle school (12-13 years old). At least two data collection phases will be performed as part of the intervention. First, we plan to collect an initial (pre-intervention) baseline survey for all students who take part in the intervention (treatment and control group). The baseline survey will collect information on students’ socio-economic background, family composition, proxies for aspirations and beliefs, as well as some measure for academic performance and preferences for the continuation of the academic career. Second, a final survey will be administered at the end of the intervention to collect information, among others, on students’ aspirations, ambitions, motivation, school engagement, and preferences for the continuation of the academic career.
Children randomly assigned to the treatment group will attend two 1-hour online meetings with role models. In the first part of these meetings, role models will illustrate to students their own experience, story, and difficulties. The second part of the meeting will be more interactive with students directly interacting with role models in a Q&A section.
In principle, role models participating in the project should have roots and backgrounds comparable to students to facilitate an identification process, but successful in their life. For instance, two of the role models are a woman who is an aerospace quality manager and founder of an association of successful women, and a professor at one of the most prestigious Italian university and head of an innovative laboratory in the sector of robotics.
During the meetings, the role models will describe their experience, their professional role, and their background. More importantly, role models will also describe the obstacles and main difficulties faced to reach their position and success.
Each meeting will consist of two parts. In the first part, after a short introduction by a moderator, role models will start telling students about their own experience. Role model will be free to show a few slides during their presentation with pictures or images summarizing their background and/or aspects related with their current position/activity.
Every student part of the treatment group and, therefore, exposed to the role models will participate to two meetings: one meeting with a female role model and one meeting with a male role model. Since different students will be exposed to different role models whose personal characteristics may differ, we can test for possible heterogeneity in the treatment effect. Furthermore, the design allows us to explore potential differences in the treatment effect by students’ gender.
Before starting the intervention, the research team has met each role model and shared a document reporting the main topics that, in principle, should be generally covered during the meeting with students. These topics are family and territorial background, educational career (choices, obstacles and difficulties), professional career (activities, achievements, initiatives), difficulties (obstacles, discrimination, barriers faced in life), other topics of importance for the role model. The research team will also meet teachers in schools participating in the study to share and discuss the content of the intervention.
As mentioned, the intervention consists of two main data collection phases (baseline and post-intervention). However, we will consider further future data collection process involving, e.g., teachers and/or role models. Moreover, we will consider collecting data about students’ performance in the next academic year.