Essays in the economics of education

This dissertation consists of three chapters that review randomized controlled trials in educational contexts, broadly focusing on cognitive skills. The first chapter uses an online experiment to study the importance of a specific piece of information provided by role models, namely that success is possible for somebody like them. The second chapter evaluates a field experiment in Czech high schools where students were taught argumentative and reasoning skills. The third chapter investigates the importance of peer spillovers in randomized interventions on a sample of adolescents from three middle schools in Chicago, Illinois. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of practical challenges to conducting and evaluating educational interventions.