PhD Thesis
Title: Behavioural Interventions in Education and Decision-Making: Evidence from Field and Laboratory Experiments
My doctoral research explores how behavioural and psychological mechanisms shape both learning outcomes and economic decision-making. It combines field and laboratory experiments to test how nudges, framing, and resilience-building affect teacher behaviour, student learning, and risk attitudes.
Paper 1 – “Adoption of New Teaching Practices: Evidence from a Survey Experiment”
This paper examines whether providing teachers with more structured information about training programs can increase their willingness to adopt new classroom practices. In a multi-country survey experiment with 2,054 K–12 teachers from Latin America, India, and Kenya, the treatment vignette (i) described the training with greater clarity and detail, (ii) highlighted improvements in test scores and outcomes from schools that had implemented the techniques, and (iii) provided step-by-step guidance to lower perceived implementation costs. Results show stronger stated adoption intentions among female and public-school teachers, suggesting that low-cost framing changes can meaningfully enhance professional development uptake.
Paper 2 – “Can Loss Aversion Be Changed? Evidence from a Resilience Training Experiment”
This laboratory experiment examines whether resilience training can reduce loss aversion—the tendency to weigh losses more heavily than gains. Participants were randomly assigned to a resilience-based psychological training or a placebo PowerPoint-skills session and completed Multiple Price List tasks within the DOSE framework. Estimated prospect-theory parameters show that resilience training significantly lowers loss-aversion coefficients (λ) in certainty-equivalent tasks, without comparable effects in lottery-equivalent formats. The results suggest that loss aversion is a malleable, psychologically grounded feature of behaviour shaped by emotional-regulation training.
Paper 3 – “What Drives Foundational Learning? Experimental Evidence on Instructional and Behavioral Mechanisms”
This field experiment in Pakistan’s Merged Areas evaluates how instructional supports and behavioural engagement—teacher, parent, and community nudges—affect early-grade learning. Community and parental interventions produced the largest gains, highlighting the importance of aligning behavioural mechanisms across households and classrooms.