Principal investigator: Eduarda Miller de Figueiredo
Authors: Sule Alan, Ceren Baysan, Mert Gumren and Elif Kubilay
Location of the Intervention: Turkey
Sample Size: 6.500 children (222 classrooms)
Sector: Education
Primary Variable of Interest: Child's interest
Type of Intervention: Program to create cohesion in the classroom between refugee students and host students.
Methodology: OLS
Summary
Education plays an important role in the development of social skills, which becomes even more important in turbulent socio-political conditions. In Turkey, there has been a shift in the ethnic composition of schools due to the large influx of refugee children. To achieve social cohesion within schools, a program was implemented that encouraged students to strive to understand the perspective of any individual, regardless of their identity. The results suggest that, in addition to improved social cohesion, there was a reduction in violent events on school premises and a significant improvement in the learning of refugee children.
- Policy Problem
Public education has demonstrated a critical role in the development of social skills, reducing the social distance between individuals in culturally diverse environments. While humans thrive in cohesive environments with high social capital, non-cohesive environments (characterized by violence, intolerance, and identity-based segregation) can emerge under turbulent sociopolitical conditions. In these conditions, existing social capital can be damaged, hindering economic growth, and reconstruction through educational interventions can become a political imperative (Rodrik, 1999; Fryer and Loury, 2013; Voigtlaender et al., 2020).
The authors evaluate in this article an educational program designed to develop social skills and build social cohesion in schools. However, this program was implemented in Turkish primary schools, where the ethnic composition of the schools has changed due to a large influx of refugee children. Therefore, it is a high-risk context, given that ethnic tensions within school premises and in neighboring neighborhoods have increased alarmingly.
The program requires a particular socio-cognitive skill and perspective-taking ability, which is the capacity to perceive the states of mind of others and understand their goals and intentions. Studies show that perspective-taking is associated with less social aggression, greater trust, and greater social cooperation (Galinsky and Ku, 2004). High perspective-taking ability is also related to being able to analyze social situations by weighing the costs and benefits of an action before engaging in the act, which is effective in reducing crime and violent behavior in various contexts (Alan and Ertac, 2018).
- Implementation and Evaluation Context
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Turkey has received over 4 million refugees, and there are currently more than 1 million Syrian children in Turkey. Because of this, the Turkish Ministry of Education (MoE) has faced significant challenges in placing refugee children in public schools, requiring proper training and guidance to facilitate integration between hosts and refugees.
The program evaluated by the authors was designed, implemented, and also assessed within this sociopolitical context.
- Policy/Program Details
Based on findings in the literature regarding the significant impacts of perspective-taking skills, the multidisciplinary team designed a program as a set of activities to develop children's ability to understand perspectives.[1]The program's design ensures that the content does not explicitly reference ethnicity, only encouraging students to strive to understand the perspective of any individual, regardless of their identity. In other words, instead of making any explicit ethnic references, the program fosters tolerance towards others, valuing individual differences.
It is an educational cohesion program aimed at third and fourth grade elementary school children, designed to provide teachers with an easy-to-follow curriculum to create classroom cohesion and ensure a healthy learning environment for all children. The program includes various activities and games to be implemented by the teacher.
- Assessment Method
The program was implemented as a randomized controlled trial. The sample consisted of 222 classrooms from 80 primary schools in two provinces in Turkey. Therefore, the study encompassed more than 6.500 children in the third and fourth grades, of which 16% were refugees.
Baseline data were collected in 2018, and subsequently, randomization at the school level was conducted. Forty schools were assigned to the treatment group and forty schools to the control group. Teacher training seminars from the treated schools took place in November 2018. Final data were collected in May 2019.
The authors estimated the program's effect on cohesion outcomes using an empirical specification where the dependent variable was the child's outcome of interest. i in school sControl variables were added that included age, gender, refugee status, and score in Raven's[2] and Eyes Test[3]Classroom and school size.
- Main results
The program significantly reduced the number of violent events perpetrated by children. In the classrooms of the control group, on average, there were 1,88 recorded events in 10 days. The treatment effect resulted in 1,21 fewer events, implying a significant decline of approximately 64%. Results also demonstrated that the program significantly reduced the number of incidents that victimized the children served, by around 50% in the treatment schools. According to the authors, the results suggest that the program, by keeping children away from conflict, reduced the risk of a child becoming a victim of conflict.
The average number of violent episodes in 10 days is 7,83 in the control schools, and the program reduces it by 2,4 episodes. The authors point out that almost half of this overall reduction was in untreated classrooms, thus suggesting spillover effects of the program in the schools. One of the reasons that may have influenced these spillover effects, according to the authors, is that the participating classrooms received many visual materials (posters and pamphlets) and, as they are quite visible, were probably also observed by classmates near the participating classrooms. Or it may also be due to spillovers from the changes that occurred in the interactions between students.
Regarding bullying, although the program had no effect on the likelihood of host children being bullied by a peer, treated refugee children reported a lower probability of bullying than untreated refugee children.
Therefore, the authors discover, through the program evaluation, that there is a significant reduction in high-intensity peer violence and victimization on school premises. A reduction in social exclusion and ethnic segregation in the classroom was also noted. Furthermore, a considerable improvement in the refugee children's proficiency in the host country's language was observed.
- Lessons in Public Policy
The authors emphasize that, even with the difficulty of evaluating the individual and social value of reducing violence, social exclusion, and ethnic segregation in schools, the evaluated program continues to be considered a success even if only the learning gains of refugee children are observed. Despite being cautious about the program's external validity, the authors demonstrated that studying this program is a significant step towards understanding the causal role of public education in building social capital.
References
ALAN, Sule et al. Building social cohesion in ethnically mixed schools: An intervention on perspective taking. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, v. 136, no. 4, p. 2147-2194, 2021.
