the treatment group only in that it did not receive scholarships. Since students in the control schools were never exposed to the program (even after the _subsequent_ cohorts in Phase 2 schools became eligible for scholarships), the two groups of students can be tracked over time and their enrollment, attendance, and other outcomes compared.<sup>14</sup> All prospective recipients in program schools filled out the application forms and took the assessment test. Recipients received scholarship disbursements (conditional on remaining in school, attending regularly, and maintaining passing grades) during the 2008/09, 2009/10, and 2010/11 school years.

We use three main data sources to evaluate program impacts. First, we use the full set of data collected at the time the students applied for the scholarships: data on baseline household characteristics (which were used to construct the poverty index), as well as mathematics and Khmer language test scores for all applicants. Second, we use the official list of students who were offered a scholarship. Third, we use endline data that were collected specifically for this evaluation. These data are derived from a survey administered at the end of the 2010/11 school year, three years after the program began implementation, to a random subsample of students from each program school. The students who began participation in Phase 1 and stayed in school were finishing (or had just finished) Grade 6 at the time of the survey. The survey was administered at home (not in schools) to the child who applied for the scholarship, and it included a household module administered to the child’s mother, father, or other caregiver. In total 3,618 applicants were interviewed. For the majority of the analyses, we use data from 1,377 students from 204 schools<sup>15</sup> who were in Grade 4 at baseline and were offered a poverty- or merit-based scholarship, or would have been offered a poverty- or merit-based scholarship had they attended a Phase 1 school.

The endline survey includes measures of school attainment, of the “intensity” of school participation (based on questions related to time spent in school), as well as two measures of achievement and cognitive development based on a mathematics and a “Digitspan” test. The items on the mathematics test were drawn from a variety of sources, including the baseline mathematics test, questions from the Grade 6 National Assessment, as well as publicly released items from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) Grade 4 Assessment. A pretest ensured that only items with adequate properties were retained for the final test. The final multiple choice test measured both knowledge and the capacity to use this knowledge for problem solving. Performance on the math test is a measure of the most

> 14 Because the scholarship offers are made according to strict criteria, applicants “just above” and “just below” the cutoff for eligibility could be compared using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) approach to evaluate program impact. In future work we will use this approach, and we will be able to use data from the first and second cohorts of students who applied to the program.

> 15 Students from 4 of the original 208 schools in the sample were not part of the follow up survey because they did not offer Grade 4.

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