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Using administrative data, we develop measures of noncognitive skills and evaluate OneGoal, an intervention designed to help disadvantaged students complete college by teaching them noncognitive skills. We (1) compare the outcomes of participants and nonparticipants with similar characteristics and (2) use a difference-in-differences approach exploiting that OneGoal was introduced into different schools at different times. We estimate that OneGoal increases college enrollment by 10–20 percentage points for males and females and reduces arrest rates by 5 percentage points for males. Through a mediation analysis, we find that improvements in noncognitive skills account for 13%–32% of these effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving work outcomes for youth with disabilities and reducing their reliance on disability benefits are important policy priorities, but existing interventions have shown limited promise. We provide new evidence to inform this discussion by re‐analyzing data from the 1990s National Job Corps Study, a randomized field experiment conducted nationwide in the United States. Job Corps, which provides comprehensive training to economically disadvantaged youth, is the nation's largest youth program outside of the school system. We examine youth who had medical limitations when they enrolled in the experiment, a group that has not previously been studied. During the 4 years after random assignment, participation in Job Corps increased the earnings of youth with medical limitations—substantially more so than for youth without medical limitations—and additionally reduced their receipt of disability cash benefits. Interventions designed specifically for such youth have not typically demonstrated reductions in benefit receipt. Hence, our re‐analysis of the field experiment suggests that Job Corps could be a promising model for helping some youth with disabilities gain a foothold in the labor market and achieve greater self‐sufficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops design-based ratio estimators for clustered, blocked randomized controlled trials (RCTs), with an application to a federally funded, school-based RCT testing the effects of behavioral health interventions. We consider finite population weighted least-square estimators for average treatment effects (ATEs), allowing for general weighting schemes and covariates. We consider models with block-by-treatment status interactions as well as restricted models with block indicators only. We prove new finite population central limit theorems for each block specification. We also discuss simple variance estimators that share features with commonly used cluster-robust standard error estimators. Simulations show that the design-based ATE estimator yields nominal rejection rates with standard errors near true ones, even with few clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing policy interest in identifying contexts that cultivate self-regulation. Doing so often entails comparing groups of individuals (e.g., from different schools). We show that self-report questionnaires—the most prevalent modality for assessing self-regulation—are prone to reference bias, defined as systematic error arising from differences in the implicit standards by which individuals evaluate behavior. In three studies, adolescents (N = 229,685) whose peers performed better academically rated themselves lower in self-regulation and held higher standards for self-regulation. This effect was not observed for task measures of self-regulation and led to paradoxical predictions of college persistence 6 years later. These findings suggest that standards for self-regulation vary by social group, limiting the policy applications of self-report questionnaires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's noncognitive or socioemotional skills (e.g., persistence and self-control) are typically measured using surveys in which either children rate their own skills or adults rate the skills of children. For many purposes--including program evaluation and monitoring school systems--ratings are often collected from multiple perspectives about a single child (e.g., from both the child and an adult). Collecting data from multiple perspectives is costly, and there is limited evidence on the benefits of this approach. Using a longitudinal survey, this study compares children's noncognitive skills as reported by themselves, their guardians, and their teachers. Although reports from all three types of respondents are correlated with each other, teacher reports have the highest internal consistency and are the most predictive of children's later cognitive outcomes and behavior in school. The teacher reports add predictive power beyond baseline measures of Intelligence Quotient (IQ) for most outcomes in schools. Measures collected from children and guardians add minimal predictive power beyond the teacher reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the social, emotional, and academic impact of attending school remotely rather than in person? We address this issue using survey data collected from N = 6,576 high school students in a large, diverse school district that allowed families to choose either format in fall 2020. Controlling for baseline measures of well-being collected 1 month before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as demographics, high school students who attended school remotely reported lower levels of social, emotional, and academic well-being (effect size [ES] = 0.10, 0.08, and 0.07 standard deviations, respectively) than classmates who attended school in person—differences that were consistent across gender, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status subgroups but significantly wider among 10th–12th graders than ninth graders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluators of education interventions are increasingly designing studies to detect impacts much smaller than the 0.20 standard deviations that Cohen characterized as "small." While the need to detect smaller impacts is based on compelling arguments that such impacts are substantively meaningful, the drive to detect smaller impacts may create a new challenge for researchers: the need to guard against smaller biases. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we examine the potential for small biases to increase the risk of making false inferences as studies are powered to detect smaller impacts, a phenomenon we refer to as asymdystopia. We examine this potential for two of the most rigorous designs commonly used in education research—randomized controlled trials and regression discontinuity designs. Second, we recommend strategies researchers can use to avoid or mitigate these biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noncognitive skills (e.g., persistence and self-control) are typically measured using self-reported questionnaires in which respondents rate their own skills. In many applications--including program evaluation and school accountability systems--such reports are assumed to measure only the skill of interest. However, self-reports might also capture other dimensions aside from the skill, such as aspects of a respondent's situation, which could include incentives and the conditions in which they complete the questionnaire. To explore this possibility, this study conducted 2 experiments to estimate the extent to which survey administration conditions can affect student responses on noncognitive skill questionnaires. The first experiment tested whether providing information about the importance of noncognitive skills to students directly affects their responses, and the second experiment tested whether incentives tied to performance on another task indirectly affect responses. Both experiments suggest that self-reports of noncognitive skills are sensitive to survey conditions. The effects of the conditions are relatively large compared with those found in the program evaluation literature, ranging from 0.05 to 0.11 SDs. These findings suggest that the effects of interventions or other social policies on self-reported noncognitive skills should be interpretedwith caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a study which determined the effect of AIDS epidemic on support for elderly individuals in sub-Saharan Africa. Data analyzed was from a household survey conducted from 1991 to 2006 on elderly people over the age of 60 from 22 African countries. It presents the main outcome measures of the study. It concludes that the research findings demonstrated the potential benefits of reducing deaths from AIDS in Africa.