We study the impact on learning of a child's rank in the classroom using a unique experiment from Ecuador. Within each school, students were randomly assigned to classrooms in every grade between kindergarten and 6th grade. Therefore, two students with the same ability can have different classroom ranks because of the (random) peer composition of their classroom. To isolate the impact of rank from other peer influences we include classroom fixed effects.

Understanding health-seeking behaviors and their drivers is key for governments to manage health policies. There is a growing literature on the role of cognitive biases and heuristics in health and care-seeking behaviors, but little is known of how they might be influenced during a context of heightened anxiety and uncertainty. This study analyzes the relationship between four behavioral predictors the internal locus of control, impatience, optimism bias, and aspirations and healthcare decisions among low-income women in El Salvador.

Paid care work will represent an important source of employment in coming decades, as care dependence becomes more prevalent, care needs evolve, and the structure of households changes. But there is little systematic data on the care economy for paid caregivers in Latin America and the Caribbean. This report aims to fill this knowledge gap by quantifying the paid care workforce in the region and describing its sociodemographic and economic profile in 17 countries.

Rural, isolated, and low performing urban schools that serve disadvantaged students have difficulty attracting and retaining high-quality teachers.

In Chile, students with disabilities experienced greater difficulties in accessing well-established post-secondary institutions during the pandemic than did their peers without disabilities. For students with disabilities, the pandemic disproportionally reduced the probability of taking the general admission test for tertiary education and the probability of enrolling in a high-quality institution. This increased inequality in tertiary education.

This paper assesses the effectiveness of an intervention aimed at improving the reading skills of struggling third-grade students in Colombia. In a series of randomized experiments, students participated in remedial tutorials conducted during school hours in small groups. Trained teachers used structured pedagogical materials that can be easily scaled up. Informed by the outcomes of each cohort, we fine-tuned the intervention tools for each subsequent cohort. We found positive and persistent impacts on literacy scores and positive spillovers on some mathematics scores.

Using a rich set of administrative data, we study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the transition to tertiary education for students with disabilities in Chile. Enrollment rates in primary and secondary education in Chile differ by less than 2 percentage points for students with or without disabilities, but there is an approximately 17 percentage point gap in enrollment in tertiary education.

The main message is that mathematics and science achievement improves when students are at the center of the learning process. This means that the teacher guides the learning process, keeping class discussion focused on the content while encouraging divergent thinking. Studentcentered learning approaches also typically include scientific or mathematical reasoning, experimentation, group work, and dialogue. Some authors refer to this type of teaching approach as ¿student-centered discovery¿ or ¿student-centered inquiry,¿ while others simply call it hands-on learning.