We report results from a randomized educational intervention targeting 3rd and 4th grade students (9-10 year-olds) in public elementary schools in Turkey, designed to promote patience and self-control. As part of the intervention, students receive in-class training on forward-looking behavior and the benefits of saving. We then measure the causal impact of the training on students’ choices and attitudes via incentivized decision-making experiments. We also gather a large set of background variables using surveys on students, parents and teachers, as well as the actual school outcomes of the children.

For impact evaluation, we use “multiple price list” and “convex time budget” tasks to elicit time preference, involving trade-offs between awards to be received at different points in time. We estimate a statistically significant average treatment effect of the training on time preferences. More specifically, students who received the training make more patient choices in incentivized tasks than those in the control group. The treatment effect is stronger for initially present-biased children. The elicited attitudes also have strong relationships with actual school outcomes such as grades and behavioral conduct.

(Co-author: Sule Alan (University of Essex.)