Economics of Education Review最新文献

This paper investigates the extent to which means-tested scholarships received by higher education students crowd out parental financial support at the intensive margin. We estimate a private transfer function using survey data collected in France in 2014 on a sample of students aged 18–24 who receive public scholarships. Introducing the amount of public transfer as an exogenous covariate, we find that one additional euro of scholarship is associated with a decrease in parental transfers of 0.40 euro. Using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits the non-linear schedule of the scholarship amount, we find a larger effect with a decrease of about 0.50. Our results suggest that a substantial part of the scholarship benefits low-income parents by reducing the amount of money they give to their student children.

We study the effects of enrichment activities such as reading, homework, and extracurricular lessons on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We take into consideration the opportunity cost of spending time on enrichment, as it may replace activities such as sleep and socializing. Our study controls for selection on unobservables using a control function approach that leverages the fact that many children spend zero hours per week on enrichment activities. At zero enrichment, confounders vary but enrichment does not, giving us direct information about the effect of confounders on skills. Using time diary data available in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that the net effect of the last hour of enrichment is close to zero for cognitive skills and negative for non-cognitive skills. The negative effects for non-cognitive skills are concentrated in high school, consistent with elevated academic pressure related to college admissions.

After-school programs provide structured care throughout the academic year. In Norway, after-school programs are an integrated part of school, used to extend the school day to a full working day. Participation is voluntary and is subject to fees paid by parents. In 2016/17, the municipality of Oslo gradually introduced and expanded an offer of free part-time participation in its after-school program, starting with city districts with a high share of children with an immigrant background who were underrepresented in the program at the time. We utilize the staggered rollout of this policy to investigate the effects on enrollment and learning outcomes and conduct an exploratory analysis of student welfare and maternal labor supply. We find that the take-up was substantial, raising enrollment rates from about 70 to 95% in the first wave of affected schools. Despite this, our difference-in-differences estimates show no overall effect of the program on academic performance, neither on average nor across subgroups. There is also little evidence that the program enhanced student well-being or decreased bullying. Heterogeneity analysis does, however, suggest that the program increased earnings for mothers with an immigrant background by about 10 percent.

The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in a dramatic move to online education. Although schools and colleges have returned to in-person classes, student and professor interest in online testing in university contexts remains high, given concerns about testing anxiety as well as the considerably lower administrative costs associated with online testing. The modality of testing may have significant consequences for student performance, learning, and integrity. We vary the modality of testing for midterm exams in two large, introductory courses at a state university. We find that students perform substantially better on online exams, but that the premium largely disappears if never-before-seen questions are used. The online premium for low-performing students is particularly large, exceeding a full letter-grade, which is likely to have considerable implications for course pass rates. These results have significant implications for instructors seeking to gain the logistical simplicity of online testing and the benefits of increased student satisfaction, without encouraging dishonesty in testing.

Affirmative action in higher education can lead to mismatch, where students admitted through preferential treatment struggle academically due to inadequate preparation before college. Although some students may face initial challenges, by providing access to quality education for talented individuals who might have otherwise been overlooked due to systemic disadvantages, these programs may enable students to bridge the gap and catch up to their peers. In this study, we examine the effects of a quota-type affirmative action policy on gaps in college outcomes between potential beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. Using comprehensive administrative data from a leading Brazilian university which implemented affirmative action in 2005, we find that compared to their non-quota peers, potential quota beneficiaries are less likely to progress smoothly through college and less likely to graduate, a result that is mostly driven by those who would not be admitted to the university otherwise. Notably, however, most of these differences shrink as the students progress through college, suggesting a catch-up effect between those groups. While potential quota students initially face challenges, resulting in a reduced course load in their early college years, they compensate by taking more credits in later years to ultimately graduate.

This paper estimates the impact of accountability scores on Brazilian higher education. We implement a regression discontinuity design to explore a natural experiment resulting from the federal rules for assigning quality levels to undergraduate programs. We test whether program quality is sensitive to negative reinforcement, such as punishments imposed when a minimum threshold is not attained. The findings indicate that program administrators exhibit a positive response to the prospect of punishment by enhancing program quality in the subsequent evaluation cycle. The primary drivers of this advancement – infrastructure, teaching and learning evaluations, faculty dedication, and the proportion of faculty with a Ph.D. degree – are largely under the administrators’ direct control. However, quality indicators less subject to administrative manipulation, such as student performance and value-added measures, exhibit minimal change.

This paper studies the effect on students’ scores of incentivizing in-service teacher training in a system that conditions teacher promotions to in-service training take-up. In Ecuador, teachers need to pass a compulsory knowledge test with a minimum score and undergo substantial training to qualify for a promotion. We use a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of incentivizing in-service teacher training on students’ scores on a standardized national university entrance exam. We find that in-service training significantly improves students’ verbal test scores by 0.19 to 0.31 standard deviations (depending on the selected comparison window).

This paper presents evidence of large learning losses and partial recovery in Guanajuato, Mexico, during and after the school closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning losses were estimated using administrative data from enrollment records and by comparing the results of a census-based standardized test administered to approximately 20,000 5th and 6th graders in: (a) March 2020 (a few weeks before school closed); (b) November 2021 (2 months after schools reopened); and (c) June of 2023 (21 months after schools re-opened and over three years after the pandemic started). On average, students performed 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations lower in Spanish and math after schools reopened, equivalent to 0.66 to 0.87 years of schooling in Spanish and 0.87 to 1.05 years of schooling in math. By June of 2023, students were able to make up for $\sim$60% of the learning loss that built up during school closures but still scored 0.08–0.11 standard deviations below their pre-pandemic levels (equivalent to 0.23–0.36 years of schooling).

Educational performance gaps are a long-lasting issue of concern in many countries. Many times, these gaps are measured using low-stakes tests that are especially sensitive to motivation and test engagement. I conduct a field experiment in 7 Israeli Jewish and Arab middle schools and use data from PISA 2015 to investigate whether part of the performance gaps between ethnic minority and majority groups could be attributed to test engagement rather than proficiency. I find that test engagement can account for more than 50% of the performance gaps measured in low-stakes assessments. Test engagement is also important, as it correlates with several personality traits important to life outcomes. Therefore, considering the importance of both test engagement, which influences low-stakes assessments, and proficiency, which is more accurately discerned in high-stakes assessments, policymakers should make deliberate decisions regarding the stakes assigned to assessment tests, taking into account the specific evaluation criteria that they aim to emphasize.

We use administrative data from Norway to examine recent trends in the association between parents’ prime age earnings rank and offspring's educational performance rank by age 15/16. We show that the intergenerational correlation between these two ranks has increased over the past decades, and that offspring from economically disadvantaged families have fallen behind. This has happened despite public policies contributing to leveling the playing field. We show that the expansion of universal childcare and, more recently, the increased teacher-pupil ratio in compulsory school, have disproportionally benefited lower class offspring. The rising influence of parents’ earnings rank can partly be explained by a strengthened intragenerational association between earnings rank and education among parents, as educational achievement has an inheritable component. Yet a considerable unexplained rise in the influence of family background remains, consistent with evidence pointing toward increased parental involvement in children's lives, plausibly in response to higher returns to education.