Effort Project. Parent experimental data and associated survey data

If the same question was asked on first and second parental surveys, missing responses on second survey were filled in with non-missing responses from first survey. Responses may vary for certain questions depending on whether it was a different parent who answered the first versus second survey. Therefore, it is required that it was the same parent was answering in order for these missing responses to be imputed this way.

The aim of the EFFORT project is to measure cognitive effort in children and understand how it relates to their socioeconomic background. To carry this out, a large sample of school children conducted different real-effort tasks in Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. This new methodology will produce the first reliable evidence of socioeconomic differences in effort.

The findings will provide valuable insights for educational practitioners and help design policies aimed at improving equality of opportunity. Experimental data stems from a lab experiment carried out with fifth-grade students from primary schools in the metropolitan area of Madrid, Spain, during the school year 2019/2020 and 2021/2022 (n = 806). The schools were randomly selected from a sample stratified by neighborhood income quartile and type of school (public, private and charter).

All the students carried out three real-effort tasks (adopted from behavioral economics and cognitive psychology) under different incentive conditions. This multidimensional approach yields a comprehensive measure of cognitive effort that minimizes the influence of ability. Furthermore, socioeconomic and other demographic data was gathered from surveys of children, parents, and teachers.

An additional auxiliary dataset was collected during the study, which measures parental effort for a subset of children who participated in the laboratory experiment (n = 163). A subset of parents of the participating children were recruited to take part in a follow-up online study, which was essentially a streamlined version of that done by the children. The parents completed two of the three same real-effort tasks under a monetary piece-rate incentive scheme.

In addition to the real-effort tasks, participating parents completed another survey that gathered socioeconomic and other demographic data (some of this information is repeated from the first round of parental surveys).