Economics of Education Review最新文献

Racial gaps in the adjudication of student misconduct are well documented—relative to white students engaged in similar behaviors, students of color are more likely to be disciplined and the discipline they receive tends to be harsher. We show that racial disparities in the adjudication of fighting infractions depend on the racial composition of incidents. While significant disparities exist within schools, we find little if any within-incident disparities. Examining disparities across fights, we show that students of color are punished more severely, on average, as fights involving only students of color are punished more severely than fights involving only white students. Moreover, students of color in multi-race fights receive punishments that are statistically indistinguishable from those assigned to white students in fights involving only white students, suggesting that disparities arise from the differential adjudication of incidents by their racial composition rather than from the differential adjudication of students within the same incident.

This is one of the first studies of the mismatch between students’ test scores and teachers’ estimations of those scores in low- and middle-income countries. Prior studies in high-income countries have found strong correlations between these metrics. We leverage data on actual and estimated scores in math and language from India and Bangladesh and find that teachers misestimate their students’ scores and that their estimations reveal their misconceptions about students in most need of support and variability within their class. This pattern is partly explained by teachers’ propensity to overestimate the scores of low-achieving students and to overweight the importance of intelligence. Teachers seem unaware of their errors, expressing confidence in estimations and surprise about their students’ performance once revealed.

Advanced courses prepare high school students for college material and the associated exams provide a low cost way to earn college credit. The College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program is the most common in the United States, with about 40 percent of graduating seniors taking at least one AP exam in recent years. However, these opportunities are not equal across high school students due to variation in school offerings and potentially limiting exam fees. We examine the effects of two state-level policies designed to provide greater access to this program: the first mandates a minimum number of AP courses to be offered in each high school and the second waives exam fees for all students for at least one exam. Our event study and two-way fixed effect estimates suggest that mandating the provision of AP courses raises the percent of high school graduates taking AP exams by 4 to 5 percentage points, while exam fee waivers increase participation by about 1.5 percentage points. At the same time, pass rates fell after implementation of the two policies, indicating that marginal exam takers are less proficient on the exams. We find both policies have minimal effects on the percent of graduates who passed at least one AP exam or on the number of passing exams per high school student.

Little is known about the impact of peer personality on human capital formation. The paper studies the impact of peers’ persistence, a personality trait reflecting perseverance in the face of challenges and setbacks, on student achievement. Exploiting student-classroom random assignments in middle schools in China, I find that having more persistent peers improves student achievement. I identify three mechanisms: (i) an increase in students’ own persistence and self-disciplined behaviors, (ii) teachers exhibiting greater responsibility and patience, along with increased time spent on teaching preparation, and (iii) the formation of endogenous friendship networks characterized by academically successful peers and fewer disruptive peers, especially among students with similar levels of persistence.

While school-aged children in resource-poor settings often perform poorly on standardized tests in mathematics, they can frequently be seen engaging in market activities, conducting monetary transactions. This suggests that children in these settings actually have much more advanced skills in basic mathematics than what is assessed at school. For this study, we designed a learning assessment that captures a broader skill set, including tasks presented as formal and informal mathematics. We provide evidence of a considerable skill gap between formal mathematics and informal mathematics in a large sample of school-aged children in North-West Nigeria. We explore several potential explanations for this skill gap. Market engagement is positively associated with the ability to solve the informal tasks but not formal tasks.

This paper studies school choice and information frictions in Haiti. Through a randomized control trial, we assess the impact of disclosing school-level test score information on learning outcomes, prices, and market shares. We find evidence that in markets where information was disclosed, students attending private schools increased test scores. The results also suggest private schools with higher baseline test scores increased their market share as well as their fees when the disclosure policy is implemented. While prices and test scores were not significantly correlated in the baseline survey, they exhibited a significant and positive correlation in treatment markets after information disclosure. These results underscore the potential of information provision to enhance market efficiency and improve children’s welfare in context such as Haiti.

Most states responded to the onset of the pandemic by granting temporary licenses that allowed teachers to work in classrooms without first passing the typical licensure exams. In this paper, we examine the result of this policy in Massachusetts using data on multiple cohorts of emergency licensed teachers (ELTs). We find that ELTs were slightly more likely to be retained in the same school than teachers from other entry routes. However, ELTs’ students scored significantly lower on standardized tests in math and science than other students in the same school and same year. Our findings are at odds with earlier, more positive assessments of emergency licensure. Our updated results appear to be driven by more recent cohorts of ELTs. Overall, this study suggests policymakers should be cautious when drawing sweeping conclusions about the impacts of teacher licensure based solely on the earliest cohort of teachers who obtained pandemic-era licenses.

We estimate the value added of short-cycle higher education programs (two or three years long) to student academic and labor market outcomes. We exploit administrative data from Colombia to control for a rich set of student, peer, and local choice set characteristics. We find that program value added accounts for 60–70 percent of the variation in graduation and labor market outcomes and varies greatly across programs, across and especially within fields of study. Value-added estimates are strongly correlated with the corresponding outcomes but not with other commonly used quality measures. Value-added to labor market outcomes is positively associated with program duration and age, the degree of the provider's specialization, and the size of the city where the program is taught. We caution against the use of program rankings, which appear highly sensitive to the underlying outcome or value-added metric.

Using a sample of bachelor degree holders from the Canadian Census, this paper estimates the earnings premium that a university graduate receives from working in an occupation that requires knowledge that is related to their field of study. This is accomplished by developing an alignment score which measures the similarity between the knowledge requirements of an individual’s actual occupation, and the knowledge requirements of the occupations that their field of study trains individuals for. While controlling for field of study and occupation fixed effects, the results indicate that a one standard deviation improvement in the knowledge-alignment between one’s occupation and field of study produces an earnings premium of approximately 4.3%. This indicates that well-aligned graduates earn more than graduates from the same field of study who work in otherwise similar paying occupations that are less closely aligned with the field of study.

We study the short-run effects of a gamified online entrepreneurship training offered to high school students in Rwanda during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a randomized controlled trial, we estimate sizeable effects of the 6-week training on entrepreneurial activity. One month after the training, participants in schools offered the training were much more likely to own a business than participants in control schools. The training induced students to participate more actively in their school’s business club, to undertake more business-oriented actions, to improve their business practices, and to interact more with other youth and family members about their business ideas. We hypothesize that the training motivated treated students to sustain their business activities during the COVID-19 crisis.