Speaker: Dr Sonya Krutikova (University of Manchester)
Hosted by: University of Liverpool Management School's Economics Group
Open to: Management School PhD students and academic staff, with no sign up needed
Date: Wednesday 22 November 2023
Time: 2-3.15pm
Place: 126 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool L3 5SR - Lecture Theatre 113
Abstract
We study a randomized control trail to evaluate the impact of a scalable community-led play-based learning program targeting young children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development and health in remote deprived rural areas in Ghana.
The Lively Minds program is a “hybrid” model that leverages existing public school infrastructure to simultaneously reach the home and pre-school environments through engaging parents in running playschemes in low quality government pre-schools. We find that the program increased children’s cognition, with significant improvements in emergent-numeracy, executive function, and fine motor skills.
There were also improvements in children’s socio-emotional skills; a reduction in externalizing behavior, including both conduct problems and hyperactive behaviors.
Exploring potential mechanisms, we find that while the cognitive improvements are likely due to the direct benefits of the playschemes, improvements in socio-emotional skills require behaviour change in parents which we see most strongly among mothers who participated in the program.
The results are informative about what elements of the programme drive what impacts but also shed light on important differences in the processes which shape different dimensions of child development.
Speaker
Sonya is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester and Deputy Research Director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She has been awarded a Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship 2023-2025.
Her research is in the areas of education, labour and development economics.
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