Abstract
Besides cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills—social skills in particular—are crucial for outcomes in various domains of life. The present work describes the design of the Movigen project, an intervention study with children aged 10–13 years using enhanced physical education lessons to foster social skills in a playful way. Utilizing a novel methodological approach various incentivized economic experiments were applied to test for spillover effects of the intervention on social skills. At three points during the course of the study individuals participated in a series of incentivized economic experiments to elicit economic preferences and personality traits. Additional information about physical activity and free time activities, different psychometric scales, and family background were elicited with questionnaires. Furthermore, a subset of individuals was equipped with accelerometers for 7 days to validate the answers on physical activity in the questionnaire. The data set comprises a treatment group which received enhanced physical education lessons and a control group which received regular physical education lessons at school. The comparison of individuals' decision in the economic experiments between both groups allows to study the impact of our intervention on social skills.
Highlights
Success in various domains of life, e.g., at school or at the workplace, does depend on cognitive skills, and on non-cognitive skills
The aim of the study design is to investigate the impact of physical activity and sports participation on social skills using purposefully designed physical education lessons
we utilized a novel approach in this field
Summary
Success in various domains of life, e.g., at school or at the workplace, does depend on cognitive skills, and on non-cognitive skills. Cognitive skills refer to attributes which can be measured in terms of scores achieved in standardized tests, non-cognitive skills are more difficult to capture (Heckman and Kautz, 2012; Heckman et al, 2019). A comprehensive overview on aspects which are comprised by the term non-cognitive skills can be found in, e.g., Farrington et al (2012) and Gutman and Schoon (2013). The focus of the presented study design is on social skills which are a subset of non-cognitive skills and social competencies, respectively. Social skills cover a set of behavioral facets
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