Publications
Material incentive motivation and working memory performance of kindergartners: A large-scale randomized controlled trial
Warabud Suppalarkbunlue, Sartja Duangchaiyoosook, Varunee Khruapradit and Weerachart T. Kilenthong,
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol. 235, November 2023; pp. 105730-105746. link
This study investigated the effect of material incentive motivation on the working memory performance of kindergartners using a large-scale randomized controlled trial covering 7123 children aged 50 to 144 months (M = 75.85 months) from 19 provinces in Thailand. This study measured the working memory of young children using the digit span task. The first finding is that material incentive motivation raised the working memory performance of young children by 4% of the mean of the control group. The second finding is that young children with different background characteristics responded to material incentive motivation uniformly except for the children’s age. The third finding is that school readiness was the most predictive variable for the working memory performance of young children.
Learning Losses from School Closure due to the COVID-19 Pandemic for Thai Kindergartners
Weerachart T. Kilenthong, Khanista Boonsanong, Sartja Duangchaiyoosook, Wasinee Jantorn and Varunee Khruapradit,
Economics of Education Review, Vol. 96, October 2023. link
Using a large-scale school readiness survey in Thailand, this paper presents empirical evidence of learning losses from school closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic for kindergartners. Overall results indicate that school closure during the outbreak of COVID-19 causes significant learning losses in cognitive skills, especially in mathematics and working memory. The negative impact is heterogeneous across several dimensions, including child gender, special needs, wealth, private tutoring, caregiver education, and parental absence. This paper also estimates daily learning gains, of which significant results confirm that going to school has significantly benefited young children, especially in receptive language, mathematics, and working memory.