Evaluating social innovation: Results from a random-trial evaluation of a pilot project for the inclusion of migrant adolescents

We present a work on the evaluation of a pilot program addressed to foreign adolescents with low language skills and high dropout risk in junior high school. The intervention - developed by a private training centre for adolescents in Turin, Italy, jointly with state junior high schools - aims at filling their gaps both in general subjects knowledge and in character skills. During the experiment, the treated students are transferred to the training centre for a 290-hour professional training course. It aims at restoring students' interest in education by professionally-oriented teaching, inductive innovative pedagogic methods, and individual mentorship. The pilot experience is to be evaluated through experimental counterfactual approach. A preliminary experience run in the recent past, had positive results, although the evaluation was based only on qualitative evidence and on the subjective assessment of the teachers. For the project evaluation we constructed a grid of profiling variables, that are monitored, for students belonging both to treated and control groups. The aim is to assess social and behavioural skills, alongside other variables concerning school performance. Previous experimental evaluations of similar programs (see Kautz et al., 2014 for a survey) provide ambiguous results: depending on program features such as length of the treatment, role and pervasiveness of training, tutors, mentors, families' and peers' influence, long-term analyses showed either positive (Durlak et al., 2011; Tierney et al., 1995; Orr et al., 1994) or negative (Rodrigues-Planas, 2012) effects on some outcome variables such as behavioural attitudes, character skills, educational attainment, future wages and other labour market outcomes. For this reason the project will adopt a randomised experimental design, so as to get sound evidence on the effectiveness of the implemented activities.