The Impact of Educational Interventions by Socio-Demographic Attribute

Past work with the Construct simulation tool has asked questions at the population level: what percentage of the total population knew a fact, held a belief, or performed an action. Since several cognitive and access mechanisms have been added to Construct, and these attributes have been tied to socio-demographic sub-populations, it is now possible to examine the effects of educational interventions on sub-populations. This technical report presents a virtual experiment which analyzes a simulated population by various socio-demographic attributes. It specifies the experimental design, describes parameters used, presents a series of results which explore the effect of literacy and information access on societal sub-populations, and identifies educational interventions which may and may not be effective.