Additional schooling impacts a child's long-term performance: Study

A study conducted by Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Andreas de Barros, and Deon Filmer in Cambodia on the relevance of scholarship induced additional schooling to inculcate cognitive, socio-emotional and positive labor market outcomes exhibited mixed outcomes.

The conclusions of the study after nine years of a continuous run are positive in some aspects but largely concludes that scholarships did increase the attendance of pupils and the merit-based scholarships developed a child's cognitive behavior to a large extent but, it may not be the case always.

The study points to potentially important avenues for research and policy. Prior work argues that more schooling does not necessarily imply more learning, in turn, the work highlights that more schooling, even if it enhances learning, may not necessarily translate to noticeable changes in the labor market outcomes and may not lead to measurable improvements in socioemotional skills.

To better understand as to why this very conclusion is not enough to study the long-term impacts of increased schooling in developing countries like Cambodia, additional research is suggested by the researchers of the mentioned survey, in some fields to get the bigger picture.

Out of them, the most important ones are to understand the trend of increased labor market outcome for male students who underwent increased scholarship-based schooling and also to verify measures as to how female participation can be increased based on the same level of schooling and scholarship privileges.

Another research must be done on finding improved techniques and methods to foster socioemotional skills amongst the students which are a great factor to improve a pupil's overall performances in different spheres of his or her life as the situation demands.

(With inputs from the World Bank Documents and Reports)