The economist testing policies to reduce educational inequality
Michele Giannola looks at the impact of social environments on children’s learning
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Michele Giannola researches how social environments shape children’s development, with the goal of designing policies that expand opportunities and help all children reach their full potential. Annie Brookman-Byrne finds out more.
Annie: What do you research and why?
Michele: Children’s development and learning are deeply social. From early childhood onwards, children acquire skills through daily interactions with parents, teachers, and peers. These interactions shape how children learn, the opportunities they encounter, and how their skills develop over time.
I research how home and school social environments combine to shape children’s learning trajectories from early childhood through adolescence. I want to understand how differences in these environments create unequal opportunities for children, and how well-designed policies and interventions targeting these settings can help close these gaps.
I use a combination of observational data and experimental methods, including large-scale randomized controlled trials and survey experiments. These approaches help me identify the causal mechanisms that influence children’s development and learning.
Annie: What changes have you seen in education across the world?
Michele: Over the past few decades, one of the biggest successes in education has been a dramatic increase in school enrolment. Many countries have made enormous progress in ensuring that children attend school. However, this progress has revealed a new challenge, as we have discovered that being in school does not necessarily mean learning. As a result, the focus of both academic research and policy discussions has increasingly shifted from expanding access to education toward improving its quality.
This shift reflects a change in the children who are served by our education systems. Today, schools often welcome children who are the first in their families to attend school. Many of these children arrive having had fewer early learning opportunities and less access to educational support at home. In other words, differences in skills emerge even before formal schooling begins, making it harder for some students to keep pace once they enter the classroom.
A growing awareness of these issues has led researchers and policymakers to pay greater attention to early childhood. The years before primary school are now widely recognized as a critical window for development, a time when foundational cognitive and socioemotional skills are beginning to take shape. As a result, there is increasing focus on parenting programs and high-quality preschool education.
Investing in families and early childhood environments is now widely seen as one of the most effective ways to support children’s long-term learning and wellbeing.
“Children’s development and learning are deeply social.”
Annie: How will understanding the impacts of home and school environments on development help children?
Michele: While both families and schools play a crucial role in children’s learning, they are often studied separately. Yet children do not learn in silos. They experience both home and school environments, and their development reflects the way influences from these settings reinforce or weaken one another.
For example, a teacher who inspires curiosity in the classroom may spark a child’s interest in learning. But if that curiosity is not supported at home, perhaps because parents lack time, resources, or information, that initial spark may fade. Conversely, supportive family environments may become even more powerful when schools reinforce and build upon them. Understanding these interactions is key.
To translate these insights into practice, I collaborate with governments, NGOs, and education stakeholders to design and rigorously evaluate interventions targeting both home and school environments. In one project in Colombia, I worked with local partners to evaluate interventions designed to support learning at home and in schools, using a randomized controlled trial. The interventions included a parental engagement program to support caregivers at home and a teacher training program to improve classroom practices. Both programs placed children at the center of the learning process and aimed to strengthen foundational skills. Studying them side by side allowed us to understand how they work individually and how they interact. These partnerships enable us to test policies in real-world settings and generate evidence that can guide effective programs before they are implemented at scale.
By connecting academic research with policy and practice, I aim to improve learning environments and expand opportunities for children, helping them develop the foundational skills they need to thrive in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.
“Investing in families and early childhood environments is now widely seen as one of the most effective ways to support children’s long-term learning and wellbeing.”
Annie: What are the biggest mysteries in child development?
Michele: Despite decades of research, many fundamental questions about how children learn remain unresolved. One important mystery is how different environments interact to shape children’s development. Under what conditions can strong schools compensate for challenging home environments? And when do supportive families amplify the benefits of good teaching?
The answers may also help explain another long-standing puzzle in the field: why the impacts of some early childhood interventions fade over time. Many programs show promising short-term effects, yet these gains sometimes fade after the intervention ends, particularly once children transition into formal schooling. At the same time, other studies suggest that some of these early gains may reappear later in adulthood, for example in the form of improvements in education, employment, or wellbeing.
It may be that these patterns reflect how children’s home and school environments interact over time. If later environments reinforce earlier investments, early gains may persist. But if these environments act as substitutes rather than complements, those gains may fade.
Finally, there is still much to learn about how children develop in highly challenging environments, such as areas affected by conflict or extreme poverty. With hundreds of millions of children growing up in these contexts, identifying the factors that help protect learning and support resilience is an urgent priority.
Annie: What are your hopes for the future in the field of child development?
Michele: I hope that the field will become increasingly interdisciplinary, bringing together insights from economics, psychology, education, and child development to better understand how children learn.
Equally important will be stronger collaborations between researchers and practitioners. Research has the greatest impact when it is developed in partnership with educators, caregivers, and policymakers who are directly involved in shaping children’s learning environments.
I also hope the field will continue moving toward greater transparency and openness, making research findings accessible not only to academics, but also to educators, caregivers, and policymakers. By strengthening these connections and sharing knowledge more broadly, we can help ensure that evidence translates into meaningful improvements in children’s lives.
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Footnotes
Michele Giannola is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Naples Federico II and a research fellow at CSEF and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). He received his PhD in Economics from University College London. His research focuses on the economics of education, household decision-making, and human development, with projects in Colombia, India, Italy, and the West Bank. Michele is a 2026-2028 Jacobs CIFAR Research Fellow.