Closing Gaps: Household Evidence and Behavior Assessment

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The objective of this Technical Cooperation is to collect data about the environments to which students are exposed to, including household composition, socioeconomic status, and other relevant variables that might affect student development. Furthermore, this Technical Cooperation will also gather information regarding student's behavior from the students' households through the use of various instruments such as the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) which can capture the psychosocial perspective of children and young people, their parents and teachers. This tool considers five areas including emotional symptoms, conduct problems, hyperactivity/inattention, peer relationship problems and prosocial behavior to assess the psychological adjustment of children and youth in different households. This data will be used to study the relationship between household behavior and school learning.This TC will support the last stages of an innovative ongoing study in Ecuador, Closing Gaps. No study of teacher quality in a developing country is comparable in the rigorous design of its identification strategy, nor in its execution. The main objective for this stage of the project is to collect data through surveys regarding student's household factors to understand how different household variables affect student learning and children's behavior. These effects can only be observed throughout time and are the ones that provide the most meaningful evidence to inform policy. Hence, the Bank has been carrying out this unprecedented longitudinal study, about to enter its sixth year. In Closing Gaps, two cohorts of children entering kindergarten (in 2012 and 2013), totaling more than 24,000 students, were randomly assigned to different classrooms within 200 schools. Children from the 2012 cohort were then randomly reassigned to classrooms in 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade. In every grade, compliance with the assignment rule has been almost perfect. This TC has two specific objectives: (i) to collect the necessary data using various instruments such as the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) regarding the conditions of different households from all the participant students and ; and (ii) to compare, assess and provide a thorough analysis of the collected data that generates substantial evidence on the effects of household inputs in student learning outcomes and behavior patterns and the impacts that these factors could possibly have in the students' adult life.