Young Researcher Workshop: Unintended Consequences of Goodwill: Examining Spillover Effects in Targeted Supplementary Education Interventions

Unintended Consequences of Goodwill: Examining Spillover Effects in Targeted Supplementary Education Interventions

Speaker: Yujuan Gao, Ph.D. Candidate in Food and Resource Economics, University of Florida

Targeted supplementary education interventions are typically provided to students in low-resourced areas with the intention to narrow educational inequality. However, when such programs are implemented within classrooms, student social interactions may cause spillover effects. This paper presents a novel multi-treatment field experiment that investigates the spillover effects of targeted supplementary computer-assisted learning (CAL) and traditional paper-pencil workbook education interventions among 130 boarding schools in rural China. We also discuss the possible channels by which programs may have spillover effects on non-targeted peers' academic outcomes. We find that the paper-pencil workbook program has a negative spillover effect on untargeted non-boarding students’ school performance, but no spillover effect is detected in the CAL group. Our network interference results suggest that the negative spillover effects of the workbook program most strongly affect non-boarding students who have close-boarding peers in the same classroom. This phenomenon can be attributed to a perceived unfair treatment between boarding and non-boarding students, resulting in a lack of motivation for academic engagement among untargeted non-boarding students.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.