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Test Endurance and Remedial Education Interventions: Good News for Girls

  • Marianna Battaglia ORCID logo EMAIL logo und Marisa Hidalgo-Hidalgo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 22. August 2024

Abstract

A wide range of abilities beyond cognitive skills, including motivation, effort, and perseverance, plays an important role in shaping one’s prospects in the labor market and overall life outcomes. However, little is known about the role of education in improving these abilities, especially among teenagers for whom they are observed to be particularly malleable. We address two questions: can remedial educational interventions improve perseverance during adolescence? And, can we expect heterogeneous effects by gender? We take advantage of an education program for under-performing secondary school students implemented in Spain, and we consider testing behaviors and, in particular test endurance, as a measure of perseverance. We find that the program had a substantial positive effect on test endurance, with effects ranging from 0.04 to 0.05 of one standard deviation. This effect is particularly pronounced for girls, where the corresponding figure is 0.09 of one standard deviation.

JEL Classification: H52; I23; I28; J24

Corresponding author: Marianna Battaglia, Department of Economics (FAE), University of Alicante, Campus de San Vicente, 03080 Alicante, Spain, E-mail: 

We benefited from valuable comments of seminar participants at 2018 UCD Workshop on the Economics of Education, Alicante Workshop on Quantitative Economics, IZA World Labor Conference 2018, I Workshop in Economics of Education: Remedial Education, Non-Cognitive Skills and Gender, Non-cognitive skills and Gender, 2018 ASSET Meeting, ESPE 2019, 4th DONDENA Workshop on Public Policy 2019, LAGV 2019, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, AGEW 2020 and Australian National University. We gratefully acknowledge Ismael Sanz and F. Javier García Crespo (INEE) for their help with the data. Financial support from Fundación Ramón Areces and Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2020 118585GB-I00 and PID2021-124237NB-I00) is gratefully acknowledged. All opinions expressed are of the authors, all errors are our own.


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Supplementary Material

This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2023-0410).


Received: 2023-12-02
Accepted: 2024-07-20
Published Online: 2024-08-22

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 16.11.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/bejeap-2023-0410/html
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