Who Learns What
Long-Term Consequences of Early Access to Educational Opportunity
Carrie Miller & Meredith Phillips
American Educational Research Journal, June 2025, Pages 651-686
Abstract:
This paper examines the long-term consequences of tracking in middle school. Using longitudinal administrative data from a large, urban school district and regression and quasi-experimental matching methods, we find that students who had the opportunity to take advanced math earned higher math test scores, completed more rigorous high school coursework, and were more likely to attend a four-year college. These effects largely hold across student subgroups and are relatively robust to omitted confounders. We explore some mechanisms underlying the short-term effects of taking advanced math and conclude that differences in classroom composition, rather than differences in teachers, help explain these effects. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for efforts to improve educational equity.
Superstar Firms and College Major Choice
Darwin Choi, Dong Lou & Abhiroop Mukherjee
Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the relation between the presence of superstar firms and college students' major choice. Occurrences of superstar performers in an industry are followed by a sharp rise in the number of college students choosing to major in related fields. This cohort effect remains significant after controlling for lagged industry returns and wages. Students' tendency to follow superstars, however, is met with lower real wages earned by entry-level employees when these students enter the job market. Further evidence from two college-graduate surveys shows that such adverse career outcomes can last for decades.
Do Peers' Skills Matter for Learning in Preschool Classrooms? Within- and Across-Classroom Differences in the Relationship Between Peers' Academic Skills and Individual Skill Gains
Rebecca Bier, Elizabeth Vaade & Culleen Witthuhn
American Educational Research Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Peer interaction offers critical learning opportunities for preschool students, yet exposure to peers of different skill levels varies within and across classrooms. We explore two ways peers may affect learning: differences in who children play with in a classroom and differences in student composition across classrooms. We find that playing with higher-skilled students within one's classroom is not associated with greater achievement gains, nor is the average incoming literacy level of a classroom. However, higher concentrations of students entering preschool with the lowest literacy skills is negatively associated with gains in those classrooms. The findings shed light on mechanisms of learning in early childhood settings and have implications for preschool programming broadly.
Fight or Flight: The Impact of Post-Tenure Evaluations on Faculty Productivity and Selection
Simon Quach & Zhengyi Yu
University of Southern California Working Paper, May 2025
Abstract:
This paper examines the labor market effects of Florida's 2022 post-tenure review policy, which weakened tenure protections at public universities. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we compare faculty outcomes in Florida to nearby states. We find the policy increased faculty exits -- particularly among high-performing researchers -- indicating a brain drain rather than improved selection. Additionally, we detect no productivity gains among incumbents and observe a decline in the research output of new hires. Overall, the findings suggest that reducing tenure protections negatively affects the research capacity and competitiveness of public universities.
The pivot penalty in research
Ryan Hill et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scientists and inventors set the direction of their work amid evolving questions, opportunities and challenges, yet the understanding of pivots between research areas and their outcomes remains limited. Theories of creative search highlight the potential benefits of exploration but also emphasize difficulties in moving beyond one's expertise. Here we introduce a measurement framework to quantify how far researchers move from their existing work, and apply it to millions of papers and patents. We find a pervasive 'pivot penalty', in which the impact of new research steeply declines the further a researcher moves from their previous work. The pivot penalty applies nearly universally across science and patenting, and has been growing in magnitude over the past five decades. Larger pivots further exhibit weak engagement with established mixtures of prior knowledge, lower publication success rates and less market impact. Unexpected shocks to the research landscape, which may push researchers away from existing areas or pull them into new ones, further demonstrate substantial pivot penalties, including in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pivot penalty generalizes across fields, career stage, productivity, collaboration and funding contexts, highlighting both the breadth and depth of the adaptive challenge. Overall, the findings point to large and increasing challenges in effectively adapting to new opportunities and threats, with implications for individual researchers, research organizations, science policy and the capacity of science and society as a whole to confront emergent demands.
Outdoor physical activity is more beneficial than indoor physical activity for cognition in young people
Grace Walters et al.
Physiology & Behavior, 1 June 2025
Methods: Following familiarisation, forty-five children (aged 11-13 years) took part in an identical physical activity session outdoors and indoors; and completed a battery of cognitive tests (Stroop test, Sternberg paradigm, and Flanker task) before, immediately post-, and 45 min post-physical activity.
Results: Following outdoor, compared to indoor, physical activity response time was improved more immediately post-physical activity on the 3-item level of the Sternberg Paradigm (-34 ms vs +14 ms; P = 0.001), at 45 min post-physical activity on the complex level of the Stroop test (-94 ms vs -20 ms; P = 0.002), the 1-item (-9 ms vs +71 ms; P = 0.026) and 3-item level of the Sternberg paradigm (-37 ms vs +69 ms; P < 0.001), and the congruent level of the Flanker test (-44 ms vs -14 ms; P = 0.001). Accuracy was also improved more outdoors (compared to indoors) immediately post-physical activity (+2.0 % vs +0.4 %; P = 0.036) and 45 min post-physical activity (+2.0 % vs +0.1 %; P = 0.043) on the complex level of the Stroop test and on the incongruent level of the Flanker test (no change vs -3 %; P = 0.008).
Teacher Licensure and Workforce Quality: Insights From the First Wave of COVID Era Emergency Licenses in Massachusetts
Olivia Chi et al.
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Much recent policy debate focuses on whether states should reduce teacher licensure requirements to ease the burdens of recruiting high-quality teachers. We examine the effectiveness of individuals who entered the teacher workforce in Massachusetts during the pandemic by obtaining an emergency license, which requires only a bachelor's degree. In 2021-22, newly hired emergency licensed teachers had similar measures of student test score growth as their traditionally licensed peers. However, emergency licensed teachers with the least prior investment in teaching had lower on-the-job performance in English Language Arts and were more likely to leave teaching following the 2021-22 school year. These results encourage the creation of additional flexibility in licensure requirements for those who have demonstrated prior efforts to join the educator pipeline.
The Impacts of Virtual Charter High Schools on Secondary and Postsecondary Outcomes: Opening Up the Black Box
Joseph Ferrare et al.
Educational Researcher, forthcoming
Abstract:
As demand for virtual schools continues to grow in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a pressing need to understand how these schools influence long-term student outcomes. Utilizing administrative data from Indiana, this article estimates the impacts of virtual charter high schools on high school graduation, dropout, and college enrollment and contrasts these results to the brick-and-mortar charter high schools in the state. Using a matching cell fixed-effect design, we find that students who switched from a traditional public school in eighth grade into a virtual charter high school experienced large, negative impacts across all these outcomes. A mediation analysis found that variation in class size and school-level course-taking patterns explain a substantial portion of these impacts.
Assessing the Heterogeneous Effects of Remedial Education
Esteban Aucejo & Stephanie El Khoury
Journal of Human Capital, forthcoming
Abstract:
We analyze the effect of remedial math education on student outcomes by use of data from a large US public university and a regression discontinuity approach. Students with different math preparation levels are placed in remedial courses of varying difficulty. Our study finds that remediation increases graduation rates by 22.5 percentage points for students with lower math skills in math-intensive majors. However, students with stronger math backgrounds in advanced remedial classes do not see improved graduation outcomes. Additionally, implementation of an adaptive learning remedial program increased passing rates by 9.5 percentage points, leading to a 4.5 percentage point rise in 5-year graduation probability.
The Experimental Selection Correction Estimator: Using Experiments to Remove Biases in Observational Estimates
Susan Athey, Raj Chetty & Guido Imbens
NBER Working Paper, May 2025
Abstract:
Researchers increasingly have access to two types of data: (i) large observational datasets where treatment (e.g., class size) is not randomized but several primary outcomes (e.g., graduation rates) and secondary outcomes (e.g., test scores) are observed and (ii) experimental data in which treatment is randomized but only secondary outcomes are observed. We develop a new method to estimate treatment effects on primary outcomes in such settings. We use the difference between the secondary outcome and its predicted value based on the experimental treatment effect to measure selection bias in the observational data. Controlling for this estimate of selection bias yields an unbiased estimate of the treatment effect on the primary outcome under a new assumption that we term "latent unconfoundedness," which requires that the same confounders affect the primary and secondary outcomes. Latent unconfoundedness weakens the assumptions underlying commonly used surrogate estimators. We apply our estimator to identify the effect of third grade class size on students' outcomes. Estimated impacts on test scores using OLS regressions in observational school district data have the opposite sign of estimates from the Tennessee STAR experiment. In contrast, selection-corrected estimates in the observational data replicate the experimental estimates. Our estimator reveals that reducing class sizes by 25% increases high school graduation rates by 0.7 percentage points. Controlling for observables does not change the OLS estimates, demonstrating that experimental selection correction can remove biases that cannot be addressed with standard controls.