Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Parents’ Beliefs About Their Children’s Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments

2019; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.3348071

1556-5068

Rebecca Dizon-Ross,

Global Educational Reforms and Inequalities

Schools worldwide distribute information to parents about their children's academic performance. Do frictions prevent parents, particularly low-income parents, from accessing this information to make decisions? A field experiment in Malawi shows that, at baseline, parents' beliefs about their children's academic performance are often inaccurate. Providing parents with clear, digestible performance information causes them to update their beliefs and adjust their investments: they increase the school enrollment of their higher-performing children, decrease the enrollment of lower-performing children, and choose educational inputs that are more closely matched to their children's academic level. Heterogeneity analysis suggests information frictions are worse among the poor.