The Relationship Between School Quality and Social-Emotional Skills - Evidence from Cambodia

• In Event: Student Support in an International Perspective

Abstract

Viewed through the lens of the human‑capital model, schools are tasked with equipping students with the skills that improve labor‑market outcomes (Hanushek, 2013; Leoni, 2025). In practice, policymakers and researchers most often gauge school quality by test scores, often quantified in “value‑added” measures. These measures estimate a school’s contribution to test‑score gains controlling for prior achievement and student background (Koedel et al., 2015; Todd & Wolpin, 2003). Yet an expanding literature suggests that social‑emotional skills (SES) such as grit, social awareness, and conscientiousness, are at least as important for long‑term success as test scores (Deming, 2017; Heckman & Rubinstein, 2001; Jackson, 2018).

This raises a fundamental question: do the inputs that drive improvements in test scores also foster the SES competencies that employers value? In other words, does a school with a higher test‑score value‑added also co‑produce SES?

This study examines whether school quality—as measured by test‑score value‑added—predicts SES in an LMIC context. We use data from an RCT in Cambodia that followed primary school students from Grade 4 through early adulthood across three high‑dropout provinces (Barrera-Osorio et al., 2024). Value‑added measures were estimated for 207 schools based on test-score gains between baseline (2008–2009) and first follow‑up (2010–2011), controlling for student socioeconomic status, and gender. SES were measured in 2016–2017 using two tools: the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), which screens behavioral issues, and the Big Five test, which assesses personality traits. In our analysis, we use the individual domains from both the SDQ and Big Five tests, as well as their composite scores and an overall SES composite. We examine the relationship between school value-added and SES outcomes, and test for differences by gender and economic disadvantage.

Our results show that school value‑added is significantly associated with higher SES across all composite indices. Attending a one‑standard‑deviation higher test-score value-added school predicts a 0.089 SD increase in the SDQ composite, a 0.066 SD increase in the Big Five composite, and a 0.096 SD increase in the overall SES index. These findings suggest that better schools yield SES benefits into adulthood. Interaction terms with gender and poverty are small and insignificant, indicating that the benefits of school quality accrue similarly across subgroups.

At the domain level, school value-added is positively associated with prosocial behavior, openness, and agreeableness—traits where higher scores indicate more desirable outcomes. It is also negatively associated with internalizing and externalizing problems, where lower scores reflect better behavioral health. While for conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism, we observe coefficients in the expected direction, they are not statistically significant. These results suggest that high‑quality schools may foster socially relevant behaviors and reduce behavioral problems.

These findings provide new evidence that school quality—as captured by test‑score value‑added—predicts long‑run SES. In LMICs, value‑added measures may serve as effective proxies for overall school influence. Future research should investigate classroom‑level mechanisms to understand the factors that correlate with SES, in particular, conscientiousness, which has proven especially predictive of labor‑market outcomes (Heckman & Kautz, 2012).

Author

• Bismah Tahir, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author