Fostering Patience in the Classroom: Results from Randomized Educational Intervention

By Sule Alan, Seda Ertac. Journal of Political Economy, 2018

203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We evaluate the impact of a randomized educational intervention on children’s intertemporal choices. The intervention aims to improve the ability to imagine future selves and encourages forward-looking behavior using a structured curriculum delivered by children’s own trained teachers. We find that treated students make more patient intertemporal decisions in incentivized experimental tasks. The results persist almost 3 years after the intervention, replicate well in a different sample, and are robust across different experimental elicitation methods. The effects also extend beyond experimental outcomes: we find that treated students are significantly less likely to receive a low “behavior grade.”

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d751aa8dac5ef1284fb279981e98e9573af39926

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Citations in the corpus

Financial education in schools: A meta-analysis of experimental studies (2020, background): “Additionally, recent experiments show that financial education has an impact on intertemporal decision making among children and youth, leading to more consistent and more patient intertemporal choices (see Migheli and Moscarola, 2017; Alan and Ertac, 2018; Bover et al., 2018; Frisancho, 2018; Lührm”
Economic behavior of children and adolescents – A first survey of experimental economics results (2019, background): “Most notably, Alan and Ertac (2018a) have implemented an educational intervention promoting forward-looking behavior and patience in 9-10 year-old children in Turkish schools.”