participants report having better attitudes toward school by 0.17 standard deviations and spending 16% more time (20.4 minutes approximately) each day doing their homework. Moreover, 7.9% report that they pay more attention during classes, compared to the C group. This improvement in attitudes is also confirmed using administrative data: treated students are absent 1.6 days fewer per week than students in the comparison group. This implies a reduction of 23% in school absenteeism. These effects shed light that the ASP directly affects students’ positive attitudes toward school as the program may allow them to be involved in a different, potentially more interesting learning approach, or to be exposed to a new category of role models—tutors—along with their teachers.

Then, we estimate the ITT effect on misbehavior and violence-related outcomes, using measures from student and teacher reports. As we can see in columns (5) – (9) in panel A, after seven months of intervention, students report having committed fewer delinquent actions and being less violent compared to reports of students in the C group (in magnitudes of 0.19 and 0.14 standard deviations, respectively). Similar effects are found using teacher reports. Students randomly assigned to participate in the ASP reduced both their bad behavior at school by 0.17 standard deviations and their probability of having a misbehavior report by 6.4 percentage points.<sup>19</sup> Although our two sets of measures are not completely comparable since they differ by report source and the items and domains included—family, school, or community—results from both are consistent with an increase in participant willingness to reduce bad behavior and tendencies to violence. Combining these two groups of results, the effects we find from the intervention are similar to those previously identified in the literature. For example, Durlak et al. (2010) find a reduction in criminal behavior by 0.19–0.30 standard deviations in a meta-analysis of ASPs implemented in the United States. Similarly, Heller et al. (2017) find that the BAM program for youth in Chicago reduced violent-crime arrests, improved school engagement, and increased graduation rates.

The existence of such impacts from this ASP is not surprising to the extent that the neuroscience literature suggests it is possible to affect noncognitive skills during adolescence. Existing work suggests that noncognitive investments during that life stage can have a positive impact on the development of noncognitive skills such as behavior. For instance, Heckman and Kautz (2012) find that “soft skills” are malleable during adolescence; given that skills produced at one stage raise the productivity of investments in subsequent stages, they can predict and causally affect individuals’ success in life. In addition, Mahoney et al. (2010) and Cassel et al. (2000) posit that extracurricular involvement helps to dissuade students from involvement in delinquency and crime.

Although ASP activities do not relate directly to academic outcomes, there is evidence of a

> 19Differences in number of observations in noncognitive outcomes is because of variation in the response rate for each outcome. We estimated these results using the smallest sample (836 observations) and there were not significant differences in the results.

20