The _Treatment 2_ group, also known as “goal-setting + Recognition” received the personal best goal-setting intervention as in Treatment 1, but their ability to meet their personal best goals was tied to a Non-Financial recognition reward. These rewards were in the form of certificates of achievement given in a ceremony in front of the whole school. Students were made aware of this reward as part of the given script in Treatment 2 schools (see Figure 10).

After the treatment announcements, teachers and head-teachers in the two treatment groups were asked to give students periodic reminders of the goals they had set. Schools also received a poster to display in the school, reminding students about working on their goals every month. Systematic field-based reminders of the Personal Best goal-setting intervention was also undertaken in the two treatment schools. Each student was individually shown the goals they had set for themselves earlier that year as a reminder. Finally students were told that the endline exam would be undertaken at the end of that year, to encourage them to work on their goals.

# **2.3 Data Collection**

Baseline data collection was conducted in February 2016, which included: (i) Survey with the Head Teacher, (ii) Survey for the Form 2 English and Math teachers, and (iii) Form 2 Student Survey and Assessment. At the end of the data collection, the enumerators were instructed to make announcements to the 2 treatment groups on goal-setting exercises, and students in the treatment groups were given a (iv) Treatment Sheet to record their goals. The baseline student sample consists of around 18,281 students from all schools. Endline data collection was conducted in mid to end October 2016, which included: (i) Survey with the Head Teacher, (ii) Survey for the Form 2 English and Math teachers, and (iii) Form 2 Student Survey and Assessment in English and Math. Only students from the baseline were tested in the endline.

# **2.4 Validity of the Experimental Design**

To ensure that the randomization was successful and treatment and control schools were similar before the experiment, we perform a balance test on student and school characteristics respectively in Tables 3 and 4. We do not find any statistically significant difference in school-level characteristics, key demographic characteristics of students, and baseline achievement across treatment and control groups. Most importantly, there are no statistically significant differences across the treatment and control students on age, financial status, and baseline test score.<sup>6</sup> However, there are small imbalances on student gender. About 26% of students were absent during the endline data collection which gives us 13,426 students on which the final analysis is conducted. Table 3 shows that this attrition rate was not statistically different across study groups. After presenting the main results, we will revisit this issue of attrition and attempt to understand and alleviate concerns around its potential impact on the results.

The average age of students in the study is about 16 years and 7 months. Around 55 percent of the students are female; 74 percent reported living with both parents; 6.4 percent are repeating their current grade, and 9.7 percent are new to their respective schools. On average, students reported spending 3 hours a week studying for Mathematics outside of their school, and around 47 percent reported attending exam preparation classes for Mathematics.

> 6Figure 1 shows a similar distribution of test scores in mathematics across groups at the baseline.

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