Pedagogy
Di Xu & Shanna Smith Jaggars
Economics of Education Review, December 2013, Pages 46–57
Abstract:
Using a large administrative dataset from a statewide system including 34 community and technical colleges, the authors employed an instrumental variable technique to estimate the impact of online versus face-to-face course delivery on student course performance. The travel distance between each student's home and college campus served as an instrument for the likelihood of enrolling in an online section of a given course. In addition, college-by-course fixed effects controlled for within- and between-course selection bias. Analyses yield robust negative estimates for online learning in terms of both course persistence and course grade, contradicting the notion that there is no significant difference between online and face-to-face student outcomes — at least within the community college setting. Accordingly, both two-year and four-year colleges may wish to focus on evaluating and improving the quality of online coursework before engaging in further expansions of online learning.
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Early Retirement Incentives and Student Achievement
Maria Fitzpatrick & Michael Lovenheim
NBER Working Paper, August 2013
Abstract:
Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower-cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are likely to change the composition of teachers dramatically in the coming years. We use exogenous variation from an ERI program in Illinois in the mid-1990s to provide the first evidence in the literature of the effects of large-scale teacher retirements on student achievement. We find the program did not reduce test scores; likely, it increased them, with positive effects most pronounced in lower-SES schools.
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David Figlio, Mark Rush & Lu Yin
Journal of Labor Economics, October 2013, Pages 763-784
Abstract:
This article presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus Internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an Internet setting where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same. We find modest evidence that live-only instruction dominates Internet instruction. These results are particularly strong for Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students. We also provide suggestions for future experimentation in other settings.
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Done in 60 s? Inferring teachers’ subjective well-being from thin slices of nonverbal behavior
Johanna Pretsch et al.
Social Psychology of Education, September 2013, Pages 421-434
Abstract:
Being a teacher is known to be a particularly stressful occupation and as a consequence many teachers suffer from reduced well-being. Thus, it is important to know as soon as possible which individuals are likely to experience reduced well-being in their employment. Therefore, this study investigated whether it is possible to infer teachers’ future well-being from minimal nonverbal information, i.e., thin slices of behavior. Between 2003 and 2006, 50 teachers were filmed while holding a lesson. Naïve observers were shown 60-s clips of these teachers and were asked to predict the teachers’ satisfaction with job, life, and health in 5–8 years. Five to eight years later, the teachers’ satisfaction with job, life, and health was assessed. It was shown that judges highly agree in their predictions. Additionally, these predictions were shown to be accurate for life and job satisfaction. Thus, it is possible to predict a teacher’s well-being on the basis of thin slices of the nonverbal behavior they show while performing their job. These thin slices might therefore allow for a risk assessment in the context of teacher education and such approaches might contribute to teacher professionalism.
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School Accountability, Postsecondary Attainment and Earnings
David Deming et al.
NBER Working Paper, September 2013
Abstract:
We study the impact of accountability pressure in Texas public high schools in the 1990s on postsecondary attainment and earnings, using administrative data from the Texas Schools Project (TSP). We find that high schools respond to the risk of being rated Low-Performing by increasing student achievement on high-stakes exams. Years later, these students are more likely to have attended college and completed a four-year degree, and they have higher earnings at age 25. However, we find no overall impact - and large declines in attainment and earnings for low-scoring students - of pressure to achieve a higher accountability rating.
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Borrowing Constraints, College Enrollment, and Delayed Entry
Matthew Johnson
Journal of Labor Economics, October 2013, Pages 669-725
Abstract:
In this article, I propose and estimate a dynamic model of education, borrowing, and work decisions of high school graduates. I examine the effect of relaxing borrowing constraints on educational attainment by simulating increases in the amount students are permitted to borrow from government-sponsored loan programs. My results indicate that borrowing constraints have a small impact on attainment: the removal of education-related borrowing constraints raises bachelor’s degree completion by 2.4 percentage points. Tuition subsidies are necessary to obtain larger increases: I find that higher subsidies for average-ability students are the most cost effective targeted tuition subsidies.
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Head Start, 4 years after completing the program
Young-Joo Kim
Education Economics, Fall 2013, Pages 503-519
Abstract:
This paper studies the effect of the Head Start program on children's achievements in reading and math tests during their first 4 years of schooling after completing the program. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, I found large measurement error in the parental reports of Head Start attendance, which is new in the literature. Further I found that after accounting for measurement error and potential selection bias, black Head Start children make significant progress toward third grade, whereas white and Hispanic children reap little gain from the program relative to their peers who were exposed to other types of programs and care.
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Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers?
David Figlio, Morton Schapiro & Kevin Soter
NBER Working Paper, September 2013
Abstract:
This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus non-tenure line faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern, and employ a unique identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which non-tenure line faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from non-tenure line professors in their introductory courses. These differences are present across a wide variety of subject areas, and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s average students and less-qualified students.
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Richard Larson, Navid Ghaffarzadegan & Yi Xue
Systems Research and Behavioral Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The academic job market has become increasingly competitive for PhD graduates. In this note, we ask the basic question of ‘Are we producing more PhDs than needed?’ We take a systems approach and offer a ‘birth rate’ perspective: professors graduate PhDs who later become professors themselves, an analogue to how a population grows. We show that the reproduction rate in academia is very high. For example, in engineering, a professor in the US graduates 7.8 new PhDs during his/her whole career on average, and only one of these graduates can replace the professor's position. This implies that in a steady state, only 12.8% of PhD graduates can attain academic positions in the USA. The key insight is that the system in many places is saturated, far beyond capacity to absorb new PhDs in academia at the rates that they are being produced. Based on the analysis, we discuss policy implications.
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Incentives and Responses under No Child Left Behind: Credible threats and the Role of Competition
Rajashri Chakrabarti
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
NCLB mandated the institution of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) objectives, and schools are assigned an AYP pass/fail based on performance in these objectives. AYP-fail status is associated with negative publicity and often sanctions. Using data from Wisconsin and alternate regression discontinuity designs, I study the incentives and responses of schools that failed AYP once. Math-induced AYP-failures showed strong improvements in math, while reading-induced AYP-failures showed marked improvements in reading. Consistent with incentives, these schools showed no positive effect in other high stakes objectives. In contrast, test-participation failures showed no effect in either high stakes reading or math, while they showed some evidence of positive (though, not statistically significant) effects in test participation. Improvements in reading are associated with parallel effects in low stakes language arts (possibly, due to spillover effects), while there is no evidence of effects in low stakes science or social studies. Nor is there evidence of effects on graduation rates. Performance in low stakes grades suffered, and so did performance in weaker subgroups in spite of their inclusion in AYP computations. There is evidence of focus on marginal students around high stakes cutoffs in subject areas AYP-failed schools improved in, but this did not come at the expense of ends. Credibility of threat mattered—AYP-failed schools that faced more competition responded considerably more strongly in the objectives they had incentives in.
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Pressures of the Season: An Examination of Classroom Quality and High-Stakes Accountability
Stephen Plank & Barbara Falk Condliffe
American Educational Research Journal, October 2013, Pages 1152-1182
Abstract:
High-stakes tests are the most heavily weighted measures in accountability systems developed in response to No Child Left Behind. While some studies show high-stakes accountability being related to test score gains, others suggest these policies do not improve achievement and often result in unintended consequences. To understand mechanisms driving positive and negative effects on student learning, it is necessary to look beyond achievement data and step inside classrooms. We present findings from 2 years of observation in 23 second and third grade classrooms, capitalizing on the combination of grade levels and seasons during which we observed. On the theoretically important domain of instructional support, we find classroom quality is lower when classrooms are under greatest pressure to increase test performance.
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Heather Antecol, Ozkan Eren & Serkan Ozbeklik
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using data from a randomized experiment and fixed effect quantile regression (FEQR), we examine the effects of having a TFA teacher on test scores across the entire achievement distribution of primary school students in disadvantaged neighborhoods. While we generally find that TFA teachers neither help nor hurt students in terms of reading test scores, we find positive and statistically significant effects of TFA across the math achievement distribution for the full sample and the effects are fairly uniform. We find a similar distributional effect of TFA within student gender, although the FEQR estimates for female students are two to three times larger than for male students. We also find that there is evidence of heterogeneity in the effects of TFA for Hispanic and black students and for students taught by novice teachers. Finally, we find that the effect of TFA is homogeneous across the math achievement distribution irrespective of certification type.
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The Effect of Employment Protection on Teacher Effort
Brian Jacob
Journal of Labor Economics, October 2013, Pages 727-761
Abstract:
In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers (those with fewer than 5 years of experience) for any reason and without the hearing process typical in many urban districts. Results suggest that the policy reduced annual teacher absences by roughly 10% and reduced the incidence of frequent absences by 25%. The majority of the effect was due to changes in the composition of teachers in the district, although there is evidence of modest incentive effects for young untenured teachers.
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School Violent Crime and Academic Achievement in Chicago
Julia Burdick-Will
Sociology of Education, October 2013, Pages 343-361
Abstract:
Educational outcomes vary dramatically across schools in the United States. Many underperforming schools, especially in Chicago, also deal with high levels of violent crime on school grounds. Exposure to this type of frequent violence may be an important factor shaping already disadvantaged students’ educational experiences. However, estimating the effect of school violence on learning is difficult due to potential selection bias and the confounding of other school-level problems. Using detailed crime data from the Chicago Police Department, complete administrative records from the Chicago Public Schools, and school climate surveys conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research (2002-2010), this study exploits variation in violent crime rates within schools over time to estimate its effect on academic achievement. School and neighborhood fixed-effects models show that violent crime rates have a negative effect on test scores, but not on grades. This effect is more likely related to direct reductions in learning, through cognitive stress and classroom disruptions, than changes in perceived safety, general school climate, or discipline practices.
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What is behind the decline in student achievement in Australia?
Chris Ryan
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Australian school student achievement in reading and mathematical literacy has fallen in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) collection since 2000. This study finds that these declines were widespread in the student population, affecting both males and females. However, the decline in reading literacy occurred throughout much of the achievement distribution, while the decline in mathematical literacy was more pronounced at the top of the distribution (there were fewer high performing students in 2009 compared with 2003). Declines in both literacy domains were apparent across the entire distribution of schools, however, the falls in school performance were more apparent in private schools than in the government-run school systems in Australia. The declines were not associated with many other characteristics of schools, including many factors that might have been thought to be associated with school performance.
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Rajeev Darolia
Journal of Public Economics, October 2013, Pages 101–114
Abstract:
It is generally believed that access to financial aid will increase the likelihood that students will attend and graduate from college. There is a surprising lack of research, however, on the consequences when postsecondary institutions lose eligibility to disburse financial aid. This paper provides among the first causal estimates of institution-level financial aid funding loss on enrollment and composition of student bodies. I implement a dynamic regression discontinuity design using a multi-year rule that restricts institutions’ eligibility to offer federal aid such as Pell Grants and subsidized loans when alumni’s loan repayment rates are below allowed thresholds. Results suggest that financial aid loss discourages enrollment at for-profit institutions and institutions that offer programs of two years or less. The decline in enrollment appears to be driven by fewer new enrollees, particularly at for-profit colleges. I find less conclusive evidence that ineligibility to disburse federal financial aid substantially alters student body composition. This research is particularly relevant considering recently proposed federal rulemaking that will further limit the number of institutions eligible to disburse financial aid based on additional student loan debt repayment requirements. Restrictions such as these are intended to protect students and the integrity of federal aid programs, but may also have implications for access to higher education.
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Turning a Shove into a Nudge? A “Labeled Cash Transfer” for Education
Najy Benhassine et al.
NBER Working Paper, July 2013
Abstract:
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have been shown to increase human capital investments, but their standard features make them expensive. We use a large randomized experiment in Morocco to estimate an alternative government-run program, a “labeled cash transfer” (LCT): a small cash transfer made to fathers of school-aged children in poor rural communities, not conditional on school attendance but explicitly labeled as an education support program. We document large gains in school participation. Adding conditionality and targeting mothers make almost no difference. The program increased parents’ belief that education was a worthwhile investment, a likely pathway for the results.