Great expectations? Experimental evidence from schools in Pakistan

Minahil Asim, Ronak Jain and Vatsal Khandelwal

No 454, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: We study the effect of communicating student-specific teacher expectations on academic performance. We randomize whether students (a) receive high-performance expectations, (b) are additionally paired with a classmate for encouragement, (c) receive information about past performance, or (d) receive no message. Expectations increase math scores by 0.19σ, with especially large effects among students who randomly received ambitious expectations and were predicted to performpoorly. Information provision has comparably large effects (0.16σ), particularly in schools with low parental literacy. However, pairing students only improves scores when peers have similar characteristics. Our findings highlight low-cost, sustainable ways of leveraging teachers to improve performance.

Keywords: Expectations; information; peer effects; motivation; performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D83 D84 D91 I24 I25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ure
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