The RIPPLE Lab

Dr. Sharon Wolf, Lab Director

Dr. Sharon Wolf is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education in the Human Development and Quantitative Methods Division. She works at the intersection of child development, education, and social policy. Dr. Wolf studies how children's early educational experiences affect their learning and development, and how policies and programs can improve these experiences, particularly for underserved children. She focuses on two primary areas related to child development: family poverty, and educational experiences and school-based interventions. Both areas incorporate applied research by using social interventions to promote children's well-being.

Dr. Wolf is also affiliated with Innovations for Poverty Action, the Penn Development Research Initiative, the Populations Studies Center, and has a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychology.

What We Do

Active Projects

Parental Nudges Project in Ghana

The Parental Nudges Project (PNP) is a household-level intervention in Ghana designed in partnership with Movva Technologies to improve school-aged children’s learning outcomes in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and to address gender parity in educational outcomes. Through the program, parents and other primary caregivers receive text messages in simple English with behavioral nudges aiming to improve engagement with their children’s learning and social-emotional development. The goal of the messages is to bring parents closer to their child’s school life by prompting them to engage with their children on topics such as school, future plans and sharing how they overcame similar challenges at their age. Further, some households are randomly assigned to receive messages that promote gender-equitable outcomes in education and broader development. Partnering with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and Movva, our goal is to evaluate the impact of the text-message-based behavioral change intervention on improving parental engagement in educational activities, parental beliefs about returns to education, as well as improvements in children’s learning, enrollment, attendance and gender parity in education. The co-Principal Investigator is Dr. Elisabetta Aurino.

The Impacts of COVID-19 on Children’s Learning and Development in Ghana

This study measures the effects of COVID-19 on children’s educational and developmental outcomes and builds on the Quality Preschool For Ghana (QP4G) study, a school-randomized trial conducted in 2015-1026 when children were in pre-primary school. Children and their families have been followed in an ongoing longitudinal study. The study’s results are providing the government and development partners with unique, real-time data to inform remote-learning and social-protection efforts, as well as the re-opening of schools which started in January 2021. The co-Principal Investigator is Dr. Elisabetta Aurino.

Quality Preschool for Ghana

Working with Innovations for Poverty Action and Ghana's Ministry of Education, this project developed and evaluated a teacher in-service and coaching program, with and without parental awareness meetings, to evaluate the effectiveness of these approaches in improving kindergarten quality and children's school readiness in Ghana. We found the teacher-training and coaching model improved classroom quality and children's literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills. We have been following the children ever since, are currently planning for our sixth round of data collection when children are in their fourth and fifth grades of primary school.   The co-Principal Investigators are Drs. Lawrence Aber, Jere R. Behrman, and Elisabetta Aurino.

SEME: Soutenir les Enfants a la Maison et a l’Ecole (Promoting Learning and Reducing Child Labor in Côte d’Ivoire Through Family- and School-based Interventions)

In Côte d’Ivoire, educational quality and learning outcomes are very low, especially in rural cocoa-growing regions. Both poverty and the lack of quality and relevant education can push children out of school and into family farming. Partnering with the Ivorian government and an international NGO, we are testing a two-pronged approach to improve children’s schooling outcomes, testing individually and in combination two interventions: unconditional cash transfers and educational-quality improvement through Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) paired with e-coaching.  We use a cluster-randomized design to assign villages to (i) cash transfers, (ii) TaRL, (iii) cash transfers and TaRL, and (iv) controls. The co-Principal Investigators are Drs. Samuel Kembou, Kaja Jasinska, and Amy Ogan.

Completed Projects

Early adversity and children's school readiness

This project uses several datasets to explore how cumulative exposure to different types of early adversity–namely threat and deprivation–are associated with various domains of children's school readiness skills, as well as how children's relationship with their teachers moderates or exacerbates these associations.

EDUQ+: Evaluating the Impact of Text and Audio Messages for Parents and Teachers in Côte d’Ivoire (2018-2019)

Engaging parents in their children’s education via text messages has been shown to be effective at increasing children’s attendance in school and improving grades in Brazil, but it is unclear whether this model could be adapted to poorer countries where teacher absenteeism is high and many parents are illiterate. This randomized evaluation tests two versions of this model, using text and audio messages for parents either with or without messages to teachers in Côte d‘Ivoire. We measured impacts on student learning outcomes, child labor, parental engagement, and teacher professional outcomes.

Household Food Insecurity and Early Childhood Development in Ghana (2015-2018)

Household food security, defined as stable access to sufficient and nutritious food, is critical in the early years to meet a child’s developmental needs. In Ghana, we used longitudinal data on preschool-aged children and their households to investigate how household food insecurity was associated with early childhood development outcomes across three years. Children who experienced spells of household food insecurity had lower literacy, numeracy, and short-term memory on average. The co-Principal Investigator is Dr. Elisabetta Aurino.

Mentoring and Experiential Learning for Early Education Student Teachers in Ghana (2016-2017)

With the support of Innovations for Poverty Action, Sabre Charitable Trust, and Ghana Education Service in Ghana’s Western region, this study sought to evaluate a teacher-training and in-classroom coaching program delivered to student-teachers during their pre-service certification prior to teaching kindergarten. The intensive program was implemented through the student-teaching year, and these individuals were followed as newly-qualified teachers one and two years later. Preliminary results indicate that the program significantly improved student teachers’ implementation and knowledge of the national kindergarten curriculum. However, in the first year of posting as newly qualified teachers, these changes did not translate into improved teaching quality or impacts on child learning outcomes.

Contact Us

Sharon Wolf, Ph.D.
Email: wolfs@upenn.edu
Twitter: @WolfsSharon

Lab Inquiries:
Berta Bartoli
Email: bbartoli@upenn.edu