Game changer? Impact of a multi-component reading intervention on cognitive and socioemotional skills

We evaluate a holistic reading intervention involving 527 third-grade students in Chilean schools catering to disadvantaged populations. The intervention features an adaptive computer game designed to identify and improve weaknesses in literacy and cognitive skills, and is complemented by a mobile library and advice to parents aimed at fostering student engagement and parental involvement. Leveraging a matched-pair design under the staggered implementation of the intervention, in which we retrospectively match five schools already scheduled to receive the treatment with five schools from the yet-to-be-selected pool, we assess its impacts on both cognitive and socioemotional outcomes. Treated students are 10–30% of a standard deviation more likely to have higher academic aspirations, to believe that their performance is better than that of their peers, and that courses are easy. We also find suggestive evidence of a more internal locus of control and of improvements in performance on a nation-wide, standardized language test, indicating that a short, light-touch, and cost-effective bundled program can improve socioemotional outcomes and, potentially, reading performance.