Ability to Sustain Test Performance and Remedial Education: Good News for Girls

Growing evidence shows that skills other than cognitive are crucial to understand labor market and other outcomes in life and that these skills are more malleable than the cognitive ones at later ages. However, little is known about the role of education in improving these abilities for disadvantaged teenagers in developed countries. In this paper we address two questions: (i) Can educational interventions aimed at teenagers improve skills other than cognitive? (ii) Can we expect heterogeneous e¿ects depending on the students’ gender? We take advantage of a remedial education program for under-performing students implemented in Spain between 2005 and 2012, and, following recent literature, we consider testing and survey behaviors as measures of non-cognitive skills. We use external evaluations of the schools (PISA 2012) and exploit the variation in the question ordering of the test to compute students’ ability to sustain performance throughout it. We ¿nd that the program had a positive e¿ect on girls’ ability to sustain test performance but no impact for boys.