Motivated by the self-determination theory of psychology, we ask how simple school practices can forge students’ engagement with the academic aspect of school life. We carried out a large-scale preregistered randomized field experiment with a crossover design, involving all the students of the...

High school track choice determines college access in many countries. We hypothesize that some qualified students avoid the college-bound track simply because they overestimate admission requirements. To test this hypothesis, we designed a randomized field experiment that communicated the...

We show the evolution of the delay of gratification (DG) of 951 students aged 10-14 years old during COVID-19-induced home-based online education by exploiting data from two waves of voluntary online surveys. Students with the highest socioeconomic status (SES) experienced a marginally...

This paper investigates direct peer influence in upper-secondary track choice in the stratified and selective Hungarian educational system and makes two contributions to the literature. First, it tests both peer-contrasting and peer-conforming influences by considering peers' GPA and endogenous...

Social theories posit that peers affect students' academic self-concept (ASC). Most prominently, Big-Fish-Little-Pond, invidious comparison, and relative deprivation theories predict that exposure to academically stronger peers decreases students' ASC, and exposure to academically weaker peers...