Showing Life Opportunities: Increasing opportunity-driven entrepreneurship and STEM careers through online courses in schools

We plan to provide an RCT to assess the effect of online courses in Ecuadorian schools on intentions, career-related actions, and career choices to become an opportunity driven entrepreneur or choose a STEM type of education. We plan to work with to 14-16 year old students (almost 20,000 students) in 86 top-infrastructure public schools across Ecuador. We will randomly assign schools either to treatment (and receiving the entrepreneurship and science content online), or placebo-control (receiving a placebo treatment of online courses from standard curricula) groups. Within the treatment group we randomise the order of entrepreneurship and science courses to measure the short-term effects of each component, and to mitigate order effects. In addition, we cross-randomise schools to a role model treatment of interviews with successful scientists and entrepreneurs. We then plan to follow subjects until (at least) age 19, to measure both short-and medium-term outcomes.
 

Key facts

Stage: Published
Year: 2023
Institution: University of Kassel