Improving Reading Skills by Encouraging Children to Read: A Randomized Evaluation of the Sa Aklat Sisikat Reading Program in the Philippines
Abstract
We evaluate a program that aims to improve children's reading skills by providing classes with age-appropriate reading material and incentivizing children to read through a 31 day read-a-thon. During the read-a-thon, the program significantly increases the propensity of children to read, causing 20 percent more children to have read a book in the last week at school and increasing the number of books read by 2.3 in the last week and 7.2 in the last month. These increases extend both after the end of the program and outside of school, although at lower rates. The program also increased students’ scores on a reading assessment, causing students’ scores to improve by 0.13 standard deviations immediately after the program. The effect persisted even after the program ended with an effect of 0.06 standard deviations three months later.Download Info
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Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number 5812.Length: 36 pages
Date of creation: Jun 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5812
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Related research
Keywords: education; reading; development;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
- I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy
- O15 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2011-07-13 (All new papers)
- NEP-LAB-2011-07-13 (Labour Economics)
References
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Evan Borkum & Fang He & Leigh L. Linden, 2012. "School Libraries and Language Skills in Indian Primary Schools: A Randomized Evaluation of the Akshara Library Program," Working Papers id:5041, eSocialSciences.
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