Children and parents sometimes make ill-informed educational choices, resulting in unrealized educational goals, children dropping out of school, and children joining the labor force. In partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action and the Ministry of Education in Peru, researchers designed and rigorously evaluated two interventions intended to improve decision-making about education and time-use by providing schoolchildren and their families with information about the returns to education.

Preliminary Findings*:

• Students’ and parents’ perceptions of the financial benefits to education increased. Accessing information about the social and financial returns to education via videos and an interactive tablet application corrected misconceptions about the benefits of education.
• Dropout rates fell. Information had a significant negative effect on dropout rates in both rural and urban areas.
• Child labor effects were mixed. Videos decreased child labor for girls in urban areas, but did not affect child labor in rural areas. The tablet application reduced child labor among 6th graders in rural areas, but not among other groups.
• The Ministry of Education in Peru is continuing the intervention in 2,001 secondary schools. The marginal cost of the video campaign was less than US$0.05 per student (not including the fixed costs of producing the video). Given the low cost and promising results, the Ministry of Education is scaling the use of these videos in after school programs.

* These results are preliminary and may change after further data collection and analysis.