Gift Exchange and Hawthorne Counterfactuals
Multi-year educational experiments often face alternative explanations for initial score gains decaying over time, such as temporary surges in teacher effort driven by novelty or reciprocity rather than material input availability. Evaluating program performance without tracking supply-side effort can lead to misattributing test score decay to household behavioral responses.
Picture this
When teachers receive a new grant, they might initially feel appreciated and work harder as a gift in return, or work harder simply because they know they are being observed. Over time, this initial burst of excitement or pressure wears off, returning effort to normal levels like a new gym member who works out daily in January but stops by March.
What the evidence says
No significant differences in teacher absence or teaching activity were found between treatment and control groups in Year 1 or Year 2; moreover, contract teacher interventions yielded cumulative two-year gains twice as large as one-year gains, ruling out general novelty decay.
- Who
- 200 primary schools in Andhra Pradesh, India across 6 unannounced school observation visits in Year 1 and 4 in Year 2.
- How
- Randomized controlled experiment comparing block grant schools with extra contract teacher and diagnostic feedback interventions, monitoring teacher absence and teaching activity via unannounced visits.
What to do
Monitor direct behavioral effort metrics, such as teacher attendance and active instruction time, across multi-year field trials to empirically rule out temporary observer effects and gift-exchange dynamics.
From the source
"There are no differences in teacher absence or teaching activity across treatment and control groups in either Y1 or Y2 or within treatment schools across Y1 and Y2."
School Inputs, Household Substitution, and Test Scores