Can incentives for parents and students change educational inputs? Experimental evidence from summer school

Paco Martorell, Trey Miller, Lucrecia Santibañez and Catherine H. Augustine

Economics of Education Review, 2016, vol. 50, issue C, 113-126

Abstract: This paper examines whether incentives for parents and students can increase educational inputs, in this case, specifically, attendance. We evaluate the impact of randomly-assigned incentives for improving attendance at the summer program of a large metropolitan school district. Students were assigned to one of three experimental conditions: (1) financial incentives for parents combined with non-financial incentives for students, (2) non-financial incentives for students (no incentives for parents), and (3) control. We find that the combination of the parent and student incentives increased the daily attendance rate by 9% and the likelihood of having perfect attendance by 63%. The student-only incentives had a smaller and statistically insignificant effect on attendance. We find little evidence that these incentives affected attendance rates or standardized test scores during the regular school year following the summer program, but we do find that they increased the likelihood of re-enrolling in the district.

Keywords: Incentives; Randomized control trials; Out of school time; Summer school; Student attendance; Parent incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:50:y:2016:i:c:p:113-126

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2015.12.003

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