An intensive, school-based learning camp targeting academic and non-cognitive skills evaluated in a randomized trial

We evaluate school-based, intensive learning camps for pupils assessed ‘not ready’ for post-compulsory education, using a stratified cluster randomized trial involving 15,559 pupils in 264 schools in Denmark. Next to Danish and mathematics, the main variant targets non-cognitive skills. The alternative variant uses this time for more training in Danish and math. We find some weak evidence for positive short-run effects in the standardized test score in math (effect sizes 0.07–0.17) but not in Danish. We find some evidence of positive long-run effects on the final exams in math in grade 9 and enrolment in post-compulsory education 2.5 years post-intervention. We find no evidence that the camp affects non-cognitive skills. Our results provide a perspective on recent evidence regarding the effects of training non-cognitive skills — by running an intervention with older pupils and in a comparatively high-resource school system.