Learning about Oneself: The Effects of Performance Feedback on School Choice

Abstract

work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/ legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose, as provided below. No derivative work is allowed.Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license.Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail.Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.http://www.iadb.org 2016 Abstract * This paper designs and implements a field experiment that provides students from less advantaged backgrounds with individualized feedback on academic performance during the transition from middle to high school. The intervention reduces the gap between expected and actual performance, as well as shrinks the variance of individual ability distributions. Guided by a simple Bayesian model, the paper empirically documents the interplay between variance reductions and mean changes of beliefs in shaping curricular choices. The shift in revealed preferences on high school tracks enabled by the intervention affects schooling trajectories, with better-performing students being assigned into more academically oriented options.JEL classifications: D83, I21, I24, J24

Nudging in education

“…We note that the largest effects were among new students who were likely to be less informed about their own performance and their returns to effort. Similar diverging results were found in a Mexican study that provided disadvantaged students with feedback on their performance on a mock version of an admission test before they had to apply for secondary schools and take the real test (Bobba & Frisancho, 2016). The study found that feedback information substantially reduced the gap between perceived and actual performance and that students who updated their beliefs upward responded to the new information by applying for and enrolling in more academically oriented secondary schools.…”

“…A common feature of the interventions in Pistolesi (2017), Bandiera et al (2015) and Bobba & Frisancho (2016) is that they provide personalised information which may potentially de-bias beliefs about own ability or effort level, and therefore induce individuals to reoptimise behaviour (e.g. effort choices) and pathway (e.g.…”

Learning Better: Public Policy for Skills Development

“…Another source of inequity that provides a rationale for government intervention are information constraints. Individuals often lack accurate information about the costs of acquiring skills or about the benefits of investing in skills (Dinkelman and Martínez, 2014;Bobba and Frisancho, 2016;Jensen, 2010;Hastings et al, 2016). There are many examples of these information failures.…”

“…The goal 7 See http://diplomasnow.org/our-impact/. 8 For recent examples, see Bobba and Frisancho (2016), Dinkelman and Martínez (2014), Avitabile and de Hoyos (2015), and Jensen (2010). 9 Early results show that the program promoted socioeconomic diversity in elite universities.…”

High School Track Choice and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Urban Mexico

“…In the same context under study in this paper, Bobba and Frisancho [2014] focus on the role of students' self-perceptions about academic ability as a potential source of distortion for perceived track-specific returns and hence high school choice decisions, while De Janvry et al [2013] highlights the potential trade-off between drop-out risk and academic benefit behind students' demand for "elite" public high schools.…”