Outes, I., Sánchez, A. y Vakis, R. (2017). Cambiando la mentalidad de los estudiantes: evaluación de impacto de ¡Expande tu Mente! sobre el rendimiento académico en tres regiones del Perú (Documentos de Investigación N° 83). Lima: GRADE.

Expande tu Mente! is a low-cost, short-term socio-emotional innovation that seeks to convey to students the idea that intelligence can grow through constant practice, and that academic challenges should be conceived as an opportunity to learn. In other words, students are taught to have a ‘growth mindset’. The study was conducted in the framework of the Laboratorio de Innovación Costo-Efectiva para la Política Educativa del Ministerio de Educación (MineduLAB).

A three-month impact evaluation of the intervention showed an average increase of 0.05 standard deviations in the mathematics score of students in the second grade of secondary school in the schools assigned to the study. 800 public schools (half of them assigned to Expande tu Mente!) participated in the study. The implementation cost was US$ 0.20 per student.

For policy purposes, the findings show the potential of social-emotional interventions to activate students’ educational potential, particularly in contexts where their performance is low. Moreover, Expande tu Mente! is identified as a highly cost-effective intervention, and one that is feasible to implement in public schools.