Game Changer: Impact of a Reading Intervention on Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills
Micole De Vera,
Javier Garcia-Brazales () and
Luz Rello
Additional contact information
Javier Garcia-Brazales: CEMFI
Luz Rello: IE University
No 16937, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Abstract:
We evaluate a reading intervention involving 600 third-grade students in Chilean schools catering to disadvantaged populations. The intervention features an adaptive computer game designed to identify and improve weaknesses in literacy and cognitive skills, and is complemented by a mobile library and advice to parents to increase student's interest and parental involvement. We first quantify the impact on non-cognitive skills and academic perceptions. We find that, after just three months of intervention, treated students are 20–30 percent of a standard deviation more likely to believe that their performance is better than that of their peers, to like school, to have stronger grit, and to have a more internal locus-of-control. Gains in aspirations and self-confidence are particularly large for students that we identify as at-risk-of-dyslexia. These improvements are reflected in better performance on a nation-wide, standardized language test. Our results show that non-cognitive skills, particularly of at-risk-of-dyslexia students, can be changed through a short, light-touch, and cost-effective education technology intervention.
Keywords: field experiment; computer-based reading intervention; non-cognitive skills; Chile; dyslexia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-exp, nep-lam, nep-neu and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp16937.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16937
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().