Abstract
Indonesian students perform poorly compared with students in other countries, despite education taking a significant portion of the national budget. Although poor infrastructure is often blamed for this failure, several reports show that it may not be the sole determinant of learning outcomes. Using the concepts of a growth mindset and delayed gratification as proxies for human behavior, we conducted a field survey of four highly disadvantaged private schools in Depok, West Java, Indonesia to observe how human behaviors affect learning outcomes. We use a self-administered mathematics test to measure learning outcomes, and construct a questionnaire based on Dweck's Implicit Theory of Intelligence to measure students’ growth mindset. Delayed gratification is measured using a Convex Time Budget (CTB) questionnaire. Controlling for various student characteristics, our estimations show that a more pronounced growth mindset is associated with better math scores. Meanwhile, delayed gratification has mixed effects on learning outcomes: it has no significant effect when the relationship is estimated using an Interval Censored Regression (ICR), but has some statistical significance when an Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression is used. These results imply that a student's beliefs on a growing intelligence can affect their academic achievement, whereas the ability to resist temptation has inconclusive effects on academic achievement. This difference may be caused by several factors such as the developmental stage of students. Interestingly, satisfactory teaching practices do not necessarily lead to better math scores. Our findings, therefore, suggest that future education policy design must consider aspects of human behavior in order to more optimally benefit students.
Highlights
Indonesia has made great strides in improving universal access to education by constitutionally allocating 20% of the annual state budget towards education
Using only math test results to measure learning outcomes implies that this study should not be generalized for overall learning outcomes, since results may be differ for other subjects such as science and reading
A Column (1), (3), and (5): bβ is estimated using Ordinary Least Square (OLS); Column (2), (4), and (6): bβ is estimated using Interval Censored Regression (ICR). This field survey was conducted to examine whether a strong relationship exists between growth mindsets, delayed gratification, and learning outcomes
Summary
Indonesia has made great strides in improving universal access to education by constitutionally allocating 20% of the annual state budget towards education. The increase in spending has not resulted in better learning outcomes (de Ree et al, 2018). A cross country comparison using the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores shows that Indonesian students ranked (on average, in the three subjects of reading, mathematics, and science) 62nd out of 69 countries (OECD, 2016). Indonesia performs worse than its regional neighbors like Vietnam and Thailand. A large discrepancy remains between students’ numerical abilities and what they are supposed to know based on the education curriculum, with students showing no substantial increase in numeracy skills even after several years of schooling (Beatty et al, 2018)
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