Teodora Boneva

Rewards of True Grit

In a project with S. Alan and S. Ertac, Teodora Boneva has provided evidence on a large scale randomised educational intervention which sought to teach growth mindset ideas to improve grit in childhood. The training intervention aimed at establishing the concepts that intelligence is malleable through effort, that success can be achieved with perseverance after repeated failures and that exerting effort on challenging tasks can be rewarding. Training was allocated randomly at the school level and implemented by class teachers to a large number of fourth grade students. The results show that the intervention had affects on the students, which suggests that grit is a malleable trait that can be affected through a targeted intervention in the school environment.

Teodora Boneva's general research interests include child development, human capital formation and socio-economic inequality. Her research focuses on the evolution of preferences and skills as well as the role of beliefs in educational investment decisions. She is particularly interested in how interventions, both in the school and in the home environment, can promote child development and improve life outcomes. In her work, Ms Boneva also focuses on developing novel ways to elicit preferences and measure skills using both survey-based and experimental techniques.

Teodora Boneva is a British Academy Post-doctoral fellow at University College London (Department of Economics). She received a BSc in Economics from the University of Mannheim and an MPhil and PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge. Her research visits have taken her to Harvard University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University. She is an IZA Research Affiliate and a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group (HCEO).