The Impact Evaluation of Vietnam's Escuela Nueva (New School) Program on Students' Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills

Hai-Anh Dang (), Paul Glewwe, Jongwook Lee () and Khoa Vu ()
Additional contact information
Jongwook Lee: University of Minnesota
Khoa Vu: University of Minnesota

No 15005, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper evaluates how Vietnam's Escuela Nueva (VNEN) program, an educational reform for primary schools supported by the World Bank, affected the cognitive (mathematics and Vietnamese) and non-cognitive (socioemotional) skills of students in that country. We use propensity score matching to estimate both short-term (1-3 years) and long-term (5-7 years) average treatment effects on the treated (ATT). We find that the impacts of VNEN on students' cognitive skills are relatively small in the short-term, and that they are larger for boys, ethnic minorities, and students in Northern Vietnam. The VNEN program modestly increased primary school students' non-cognitive skills in the short-term; these impacts on non-cognitive skills are sizable and significant for ethnic minority students, although there seems to be little gender difference. The long-term impacts are less precisely estimated, but they appear to fade away, showing little or no impact of the VNEN program on cognitive skills. There is little variation of long-term impacts by gender or geographical region, although the imprecision of the estimates for ethnic minority students does not allow us to rule out large long-term impacts on cognitive skills for those students. The program's impacts on non-cognitive skills also seem to have dissipated in the long-term.

Keywords: VNEN; Vietnam Escuela Nueva; education; cognitive skills; non-cognitive skills; impact evaluation; propensity score matching; IV (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-neu, nep-sea and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
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Working Paper: The Impact Evaluation of Vietnam’s Escuela Nueva (New School) Program on Students’ Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills (2022)
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