Abstract

We evaluate the direct and indirect effects of an environmental educational program with value-laded content on children's and parents' knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding the consumption and disposal of plastics.We do this using a randomized field experiment targeting fourth-grade children in Chile.The educational program had a sizeable and a positive impact on children' knowledge, attitudes, and practices, but no effect on parents' behavior.Heterogeneous effects indicate that the program had a larger effect among children in more vulnerable schools, but there was still no effect on parents.Finally, because parents may ultimately determine what con-stitutes acceptable behavior for children, promoting permanent changes in behavior will require interventions of this sort to be complemented with other initiatives targeting parents.