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Zonder onderwerpscode: wereldeconomie, ontwikkelingsproblematiek

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Mexico's compensatory education program provides extra resources to primary schools that enroll disadvantaged students in highly disadvantaged rural communities. One of the most important components of the program is the school-based management intervention known as AGEs. The impact of the AGEs is assessed on intermediate school quality indicators (failure, repetition and dropout), controlling for the presence of the conditional cash transfer program. Results prove that school-based management is an effective measure for improving outcomes, based on an over time difference-in-difference evaluation. Complementary qualitative evidence corroborates the veracity of such findings.

Curriculum --- Curriculum Development --- Disability --- Disadvantaged Students --- Education --- Education for All --- Educational Reform --- Effective Schools and Teachers --- Information Asymmetries --- Learning --- Learning Environment --- Learning Outcomes --- Literature --- Papers --- Primary Education --- Research --- School --- School Quality --- Schools --- Secondary Education --- Social Protections and Labor --- Student --- Student Learning --- Teacher --- Teachers --- Tertiary Education --- Training --- University

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We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children. We estimate production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills as a function of maternal skills and child's past skills, as well as material and time investments that are treated as endogenous. The effects of the program can be fully explained by increases in parental investments, which have strong effects on outcomes and are complementary to both maternal skills and child's past skills.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline. We estimate the determinants of parents' material and time investments in these children and evaluate the impact of the treatment on such investments. We then estimate the production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills. The effects of the program can be explained by increases in parental investments, emphasizing the importance of parenting interventions at an early age.

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Global access to preschool has increased dramatically, yet preschool quality is often poor and evidence on how to improve it is scarce. We worked with the government of Colombia to implement a largescale randomized controlled trial evaluating two interventions targeting the quality of public preschools in Colombia. The first, which was designed by the government and rolled out nationwide, provided preschools with significant extra funding, mainly earmarked for hiring teaching assistants (TAs). The second additionally offered professional development training for existing teachers, delivered using a novel low-cost video-conferencing approach. We find that, despite increasing per-child expenditure by around a third, the first intervention did not improve child development and led to a reduction in the time that teachers spent in the classroom, including on learning activities. In contrast, the second intervention led to significant improvements in children's cognitive development, especially those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, at little extra cost. The addition of the professional development training offset the adverse effects of TA provision on the time teachers spent on learning activities in the classroom and improved the quality of teaching. When we interpret our results through the lens of a model of teacher behavior, two insights arise. First, income effects and a perception that TA time was a good substitute for their own may have led teachers to endogenously scale back their efforts in the classroom in response to the provision of new resources. Second, the training prompted teachers to increase their perception of the usefulness of learning activities for child development and their perception that they had a comparative advantage in these learning activities relative to the TAs.