Inter-American Development Bank
facebook
twitter
youtube
linkedin
instagram
Abierto al públicoBeyond BordersCaribbean Development TrendsCiudades SosteniblesEnergía para el FuturoEnfoque EducaciónFactor TrabajoGente SaludableGestión fiscalGobernarteIdeas MatterIdeas que CuentanIdeaçãoImpactoIndustrias CreativasLa Maleta AbiertaMoviliblogMás Allá de las FronterasNegocios SosteniblesPrimeros PasosPuntos sobre la iSeguridad CiudadanaSostenibilidadVolvamos a la fuente¿Y si hablamos de igualdad?Home
Citizen Security and Justice Creative Industries Development Effectiveness Early Childhood Development Education Energy Envirnment. Climate Change and Safeguards Fiscal policy and management Gender and Diversity Health Labor and pensions Open Knowledge Public management Science, Technology and Innovation  Trade and Regional Integration Urban Development and Housing Water and Sanitation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Enfoque Educación

  • HOME
  • CATEGORIES
    • Early childhood development and early education
    • Education and work
    • Educational systems
    • Financing
    • Gender and education
    • Infrastructure and educational technology
    • Teachers
  • Authors
  • English

“Take your child to preschool”: Behavioral sciences at the service of early childhood

October 23, 2020 por Laura Natalia Becerra Luna - Mercedes Mateo Leave a Comment


“Take your child to preschool” is an innovation identified in the Knowledge Hub on Early Childhood Development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Visit it to discover more innovations and resources for Early Childhood Development in the region.

Frequent attendance to a quality preschool in the early years is essential for boys and girls to develop cognitive, emotional and motor skills. However, this is usually low compared to attendance at primary education[1]. Many factors can influence preschool attendance, let’s meet Camila and Carlos’ context to understand what is behind their attendance patterns:

María and Pedro, are Camila’s parents. They consider it is important for her to attend preschool and share with her classmates, learn to interact with other adults and develop skills that maybe she could not develop at home where they don’t have a structured schedule. However, Camila’s preschool is an hour away by bus from her house and when it rains, the paths are filled with mud, making it difficult to reach the bus stop on time to avoid missing the route that would take them to the school. Therefore, during the rainy months Camila is constantly absent and cannot receive the benefits of going to preschool.

Verónica and Juan are the parents of Carlos, a 4-year-old who also attends preschool. Verónica and Juan enrolled Carlos because he reached compulsory education age, but they do not think that at preschool their son learns different things from those he can learn at home. They even consider that it can be dangerous for Carlos to be exposed to other children because he could get sick. The school is not far from their house, it is at a reasonable distance, but Carlos is constantly absent because his parents prefer him to stay at home, they coordinate visits to the doctor during school hours or schedule trips during the school year.

These examples help us understand the two most common reasons children in Latin America and the Caribbean miss preschool days. On the one hand, we find structural reasons, associated with the context of the child (e.g. income, infrastructure, transportation, factors related to the community, among others); this is the case of Camila. On the other hand, we find reasons associated with behavioral biases, where the parents’ beliefs play a decisive role in whether or not the student goes to preschool; this is Carlos’s case. These reasons are not mutually exclusive, but separating them helps us to better understand structural and behavioral barriers.

Verónica, Juan and Carlos’ family situation motivated us to seek solutions to these barriers, and we found in behavioral sciences an ally to do so at low cost. For the first time in Latin America, we explored the effectiveness of behavioral tools to improve preschool attendance in Uruguay, a country that has made great efforts to increase the coverage of initial education, but where 30% of children aged 3-5 who attend public preschools have insufficient attendance.

With the help of the Council of Initial and Primary Education (CEIP) and Innovations for Poverty Actions (IPA) we developed “Take your child to preschool”, an initiative that sent short and personalized messages (known as nudges) to parents and mothers of students in 97 public preschools nationwide. The messages were sent over a period of two and a half months through the institutional app GURÍ families, that parents use on their cell phones. Nudges made use of behavioral science tools such as reminders to help with family planning and address behavioral biases.

The nudges increased students’ attendance in the middle of the attendance distribution between 0.32 and 0.68 days, but had no effect on the extremes of the distribution. That is, it did not impact those who previously attended preschool the least or those who attended the most. This suggests that it is in the middle of the distribution where biases interfere to a greater extent with regular attendance, creating more space to influence with behavioral tools. The messages also increased preschool attendance by 1.5 days in the northeastern regions of the country, areas less populated and with lower performance in indicators such as infrastructure, economic activity, health, education and poverty. Finding effects in these regions indicates the potential of behavioral tools to reduce geographic differences at a low cost.

 What is the result of boys and girls attending more to preschool?

Using the Child Development Inventory (INDI), we found that this program positively impacts boys and girls’ language assessments, with more intense impacts in areas in the country’s northeast where this intervention also improved cognitive outcomes and learning readiness. The impacts we found are comparable to those achieved with programs that are highly intensive in human labor, such as home visits. This highlights the potential of behavioral tools to reduce inequality in access and learning from the early years. Although this intervention was carried out in 2019, in a world that was unaware of the effects of COVID, its learnings are now more relevant than ever. Having evidence of the efficiency of behavioral tools to improve educational results in children at an early age should promote an agenda where they are used to a greater extent now that we all spend more time at home.

This project was financed by the Child Development Innovation Fund, an alliance between the IDB, the FEMSA Foundation, Open Society Foundations, the Maria Cecilia Soto Vidigal Foundation, and Porticus. If you want to know more about this intervention and updates about it, visit the innovation profile in the Child Development Hub, and if you want to know other programs that use behavioral sciences visit the Behavioral Evidence Hub and discover how behavioral sciences are an ally to implement cost effective public policies.

Do you think that this type of programs based on behavioral sciences would work to reduce the absence of initial education in your country? Leave us your opinions and comments in the section below or on Twitter mentioning @BIDeducación #EnfoqueEducacion.


[1] Ehrlich, Stacy B., Julia A. Gwynne, Amber Stitziel Pareja, and Elaine M. Allensworth. 2014. Preschool Attendance in Chicago Public Schools: Relationship with Learning Outcomes and Reasons for Absences: Research Summary. Chicago: University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Dubay, L., & Holla, N. (2016). Does Attendance in Early Education Predict Attendance in Elementary School? An Analysis of DCPS’s Early Education Program. Research Report. Urban Institute.

Kalil, A., Mayer, S. E., & Gallegos, S. (2019). Using behavioral insights to increase attendance at subsidized preschool programs: The Show Up to Grow Up intervention. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.


Filed Under: Desarrollo infantil temprano y educación inicial, English

Laura Natalia Becerra Luna

Laura es consultora del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID), donde está implicada en proyectos relacionados con la educación en Uruguay, Paraguay y Colombia. También forma parte de la iniciativa “Habilidades del siglo XXI”, promovida por el BID. Su experiencia previa incluye una pasantía en la Comisión Económica de América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), en Santiago de Chile, así como el desarrollo de proyectos de investigación en la Fundación para la Educación Superior y el Desarrollo (Fedesarrollo) y en la Universidad del Rosario en Bogotá, Colombia. Cree firmemente que la educación, el compromiso y el esfuerzo nos permitirán lograr una sociedad que pueda enfrentar correctamente los desafíos sociales, políticos y culturales (actuales y futuros), aceptando la diferencia con inclusión y tolerancia. Laura es economista por la Universidad Nacional de Colombia y tiene una maestría en Economía de la Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá).

Mercedes Mateo

Mercedes Mateo-Berganza Díaz is the Chief of the Education Division at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where she leads a large team of specialists and professionals dedicated to transforming education and strengthening learning ecosystems across the region. Her work spans various areas of international development and social policy, with a strong emphasis on improving human capital and reducing inequality. Dr. Mateo-Berganza has made significant contributions in the fields of institutional reform, social cohesion, early childhood, skills development, and labor force participation. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Louvain and has been both a postdoctoral fellow at the Belgian Scientific Research Foundation and a Marie Curie fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute. Mercedes Mateo-Berganza Díaz es la Jefa de la División de Educación en el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID), donde lidera un amplio equipo de especialistas y profesionales dedicados a transformar la educación y fortalecer los ecosistemas de aprendizaje en toda la región. Su trabajo abarca diversas áreas en el ámbito del desarrollo internacional y la política social, con un fuerte énfasis en mejorar el capital humano y reducir la desigualdad. La Dra. Mateo-Berganza ha realizado contribuciones significativas en los campos de la reforma institucional, la cohesión social, la primera infancia, el desarrollo de habilidades y la participación en la fuerza laboral. Posee un doctorado en Ciencia Política de la Universidad de Lovaina y ha sido investigadora postdoctoral en la Belgian Scientific Research Foundation e investigadora Marie Curie en el Centro Robert Schuman del Instituto Universitario Europeo.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Follow Us

Subscribe

Search

Education In Focus

"Education In Focus" is the Education Division's blog, a space where our specialists and guest authors share their reflections, experiences and knowledge to promote informed discussions on educational issues among policy makers, experts, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders. Our goal: to provide insights to public policies that guarantee effective and quality education for all children and young people in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Recent Posts

  • From Digital Doppelgänger to the Real Philosopher: Interviewing “the Real” Peter Singer on AI and Ethics in Education 
  • AI and Education: How to Make a True Educational Revolution Possible 
  • Exploring AI Ethics in Education: A Conversation with Peter Singer’s chatbot 
  • Students as Global Citizens: 4 Ways to Build AI Readiness for Future-Ready Learners 
  • Education Policy and Results: It’s (almost) All in the Implementation

Footer

Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo
facebook
twitter
youtube
youtube
youtube

    Blog posts written by Bank employees:

    Copyright © Inter-American Development Bank ("IDB"). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. (CC-IGO 3.0 BY-NC-ND) license and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose. No derivative work is allowed. Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC- IGO license. Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.


    For blogs written by external parties:

    For questions concerning copyright for authors that are not IADB employees please complete the contact form for this blog.

    The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDB, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.

    Attribution: in addition to giving attribution to the respective author and copyright owner, as appropriate, we would appreciate if you could include a link that remits back the IDB Blogs website.



    Privacy Policy

    Derechos de autor © 2025 · Magazine Pro en Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

    Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo

    Aviso Legal

    Las opiniones expresadas en estos blogs son las de los autores y no necesariamente reflejan las opiniones del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, sus directivas, la Asamblea de Gobernadores o sus países miembros.

    facebook
    twitter
    youtube
    This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser.
    To learn more about cookies, click here
    X
    Manage consent

    Privacy Overview

    This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
    Necessary
    Always Enabled
    Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
    Non-necessary
    Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
    SAVE & ACCEPT