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The Action Lecture program is an innovative teaching method run in some nursery and primary schools in Paris and designed to improve pupils’ literacy. We report the results of an evaluation of this program. We describe the experimental protocol that was built to estimate the program’s impact on several types of indicators. Data were processed following a Differences-in-Differences (DID) method. Then we use the estimation of the impact on academic achievement to conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis and take a reduction of the class size program as a benchmark. The results are positive for the Action Lecture program.

Vaccination campaigns to prevent the spread of epidemics are successful only if the targeted populations subscribe to the recommendations of health authorities. However, because compulsory vaccination is hardly conceivable in modern democracies, governments need to convince their populations through efficient and persuasive information campaigns. In the context of the swine-origin A (H1N1) 2009 pandemic, we use an interactive study among the general public in the South of France, with 175 participants, to explore what type of information can induce change in vaccination intentions at both aggregate and individual levels. We find that individual attitudes to vaccination are based on rational appraisal of the situation, and that it is information of a purely scientific nature that has the only significant positive effect on intention to vaccinate.