An Intensive, School-Based Learning Camp Targeting Academic and Non-Cognitive Skills Evaluated in a Randomized Trial

Core findings, "...We evaluate two variants of a school-based, intensive learning camp for pupils who are assessed `not ready’ for further education after compulsory school, using a stratified cluster randomized trial involving 15,559 pupils in 264 schools in Denmark. Next to training pupils in Danish and mathematics, the main variant targets non-cognitive skills, while the alternative variant instead uses this time for more training in Danish and math. In the short-run, in the academic areas that are targeted in the camp, we find small positive effects in math and weak evidence for positive effects in Danish. Yet, we find no evidence of lasting effects and we do not find short-run effects on non-targeted areas in math and Danish or on non-cognitive skills. Further, we find no evidence that training of noncognitive skills affects academic outcomes. These results provide a perspective on recent evidence regarding the effects of training non-cognitive skills in schools - by running such an intervention with older pupils and in a comparatively high-resource school system...."

The exercise, "...Accordingly, we ran two variants of a two-week camp, conducted at the school of a participating pupil during the regular teaching hours, targeting grade 8 pupils in Denmark, who are assessed as ‘not ready for further education’.3 After the camp, pupils participated in followup program where they met once a week for eight weeks. In addition to math and Danish, the main learning camp variant devoted roughly 30 percent of the time to strengthen the non-cognitive skills of pupils. For example, pupils (and teachers) learned about self-regulation strategies - such as goal setting (Locke and Latham, 1990) and mental contrasting with implementation intentions (Gollwitzer et al., 2011); and they were introduced to the concept of “growth mindsets” (Dweck, 2006), which reflects a view that ability is malleable and that success is driven by effort. In the alternative variant of the camp, the time spent on training non-cognitive skills in the main variant was instead used for extra training in math and Danish. The motivation for testing two variants of the camp stems from the uncertainty as to whether non-cognitive skills can be manipulated during an intervention as short as the one studied here and which is aimed at 8th graders rather than younger pupils. The two variants allow us to investigate if the time spent training non-cognitive skills makes a difference relative to using it for additional training of academic skills...."

Outcome, "... We observe small, positive short-run effects on the targeted area in mathematics (numbers and algebra). In Danish, the evidence for positive effects is weaker as only one out of the two targeted areas (namely, text comprehension) is positively affected by the camp. In terms of long-run effects, we do not find any effects that are statistically significant at conventional levels. There is some weak indication of the camp having a positive impact on math performance in the final exams in grade 9 and on being enrolled in post-compulsory education three years after the camp. We also examine the effects on non-cognitive skills. Next to self-administered pre- and post- surveys that included several psychological scales, we observe in the register data how school counselors evaluated a pupil's readiness for further education, and use here specifically the evaluation of the personal and social skills. We do not observe any positive effects on any of these outcome measures for the main learning camp that trained non-cognitive skills. The measurement of non-cognitive skills with surveys and the evaluation of the pupil's readiness for further education has some disadvantages. However, there is some evidence to support the lacking effects on non-cognitive skills as not merely a measurement problem. Firstly, we do not observe any spillover effects to non-targeted academic areas in the standardized national tests. If the intervention at the camps affected non-cognitive skills such as self-control, one could expect the improved non-cognitive skills to broadly enhance academic performance both in targeted and non-targeted areas. This, however, is not the case. Secondly, when comparing the two camps, we primarily find non-significant differences in outcomes between the two, once again underlining the lacking effect of non-cognitive skills. Overall, the results thus suggest that the main camp did not affect non-cognitive skills….”

Charlotte Hvidman Alexander Koch Julia Nafziger Søren Albeck Nielsen Michael Rosholm, "An Intensive, School-Based Learning Camp Targeting Academic and Non-Cognitive Skills Evaluated in a Randomized Trial," Institute For Labor Economics, October 2020, https://ftp.iza.org/dp13771.pdf