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Author: Justin A. Wong
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
This dissertation is composed of three essays. Essay 1, "Does School Start Too Early For Student Learning?", considers the connection between school start time and student performance. Biological evidence indicates that adolescents' internal clocks are designed to make them fall asleep and wake up at later times than adults. This science has prompted widespread debate about delaying school start times in the U.S., a country which has some of the earliest start times worldwide. The debate suffers, however, from a glaring absence of evidence: the small number of prior studies has been too low powered statistically to test whether later start times improve achievement. I fill the gap by studying achievement across a large, nationally representative set of high schools that have varying start times. I identify the positive effect of later clock start times, as well as the independent effect of greater daylight at school start time. My primary empirical method is cross-sectional regression with rich controls for potentially confounding variables. The findings are confirmed by regression discontinuity analysis focused on schools close to time zone boundaries. I quantify the net gain in welfare from having an additional hour of sunlight before school starts by comparing the substantial lifetime earnings benefits for students against the likely the societal costs. Essay 2, "Student Success and Teaching Assistant Effectiveness In Large Classes", considers the impact teaching assistants (TAs) have on student performance. In universities, TAs play a crucial role by providing small group instruction in lecture courses with large enrollment. The multiplicity of TAs creates both positive opportunities and negative incentives. On the one hand, some TAs may excel at tasks--such as helping struggling students--at which other TAs fail. If so, all students may be able to learn better if they can match themselves to the TA that best suits their needs. On the other hand, the multiplicity of TAs means that students in the same class often receive instruction that varies in quality even though they are ultimately graded on the same standard. In this paper, we use data from a large lecture course in which students are conditionally randomly assigned to TAs. In addition to administrative data on scores and grades, we use survey data (which we generated) on students' initial preparation, their study habits, and their interactions with TAs. We identify the existence of variation among TAs in teaching effectiveness. We also identify how TAs vary in their effectiveness with certain subpopulations of students: the least and best prepared, students with different backgrounds, and so on. Using our parameter estimates, we simulate student achievement under scenarios such as random assignment to TAs, elimination/retraining of the least effective TAs, and matching of TAs to students based on initial information to show the potential gains in student welfare from more efficient matching. Essay 3, "A Study of Student Majors: A Historical Perspective", considers whether differing financial returns across degrees are a significant factor in a student's choice of a major. During the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced a technology boom that significantly increased the initial salary offers to engineering students, and computer science students in particular. These dramatic increases in returns provide an excellent opportunity to examine not only how students respond to salary levels, but also to salary trends. The existing literature has focused on the extent to which differing financial returns can affect a student's choice of undergraduate major. This paper extends the analysis to test if trends in salary levels also affect the share of students selecting into various majors using a comprehensive dataset of all post-secondary institutions. I find that students select into majors that offer higher salaries and have greater wage growth. Using a flexible empirical model that allows students to respond to both changes in salary levels and growth, I find that the results hold across majors and within engineering disciplines. These results help to explain why, for instance, the percentage of students choosing to major in computer science grew more rapidly than could be explained by salary level alone.
Author: Justin A. Wong
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
This dissertation is composed of three essays. Essay 1, "Does School Start Too Early For Student Learning?", considers the connection between school start time and student performance. Biological evidence indicates that adolescents' internal clocks are designed to make them fall asleep and wake up at later times than adults. This science has prompted widespread debate about delaying school start times in the U.S., a country which has some of the earliest start times worldwide. The debate suffers, however, from a glaring absence of evidence: the small number of prior studies has been too low powered statistically to test whether later start times improve achievement. I fill the gap by studying achievement across a large, nationally representative set of high schools that have varying start times. I identify the positive effect of later clock start times, as well as the independent effect of greater daylight at school start time. My primary empirical method is cross-sectional regression with rich controls for potentially confounding variables. The findings are confirmed by regression discontinuity analysis focused on schools close to time zone boundaries. I quantify the net gain in welfare from having an additional hour of sunlight before school starts by comparing the substantial lifetime earnings benefits for students against the likely the societal costs. Essay 2, "Student Success and Teaching Assistant Effectiveness In Large Classes", considers the impact teaching assistants (TAs) have on student performance. In universities, TAs play a crucial role by providing small group instruction in lecture courses with large enrollment. The multiplicity of TAs creates both positive opportunities and negative incentives. On the one hand, some TAs may excel at tasks--such as helping struggling students--at which other TAs fail. If so, all students may be able to learn better if they can match themselves to the TA that best suits their needs. On the other hand, the multiplicity of TAs means that students in the same class often receive instruction that varies in quality even though they are ultimately graded on the same standard. In this paper, we use data from a large lecture course in which students are conditionally randomly assigned to TAs. In addition to administrative data on scores and grades, we use survey data (which we generated) on students' initial preparation, their study habits, and their interactions with TAs. We identify the existence of variation among TAs in teaching effectiveness. We also identify how TAs vary in their effectiveness with certain subpopulations of students: the least and best prepared, students with different backgrounds, and so on. Using our parameter estimates, we simulate student achievement under scenarios such as random assignment to TAs, elimination/retraining of the least effective TAs, and matching of TAs to students based on initial information to show the potential gains in student welfare from more efficient matching. Essay 3, "A Study of Student Majors: A Historical Perspective", considers whether differing financial returns across degrees are a significant factor in a student's choice of a major. During the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced a technology boom that significantly increased the initial salary offers to engineering students, and computer science students in particular. These dramatic increases in returns provide an excellent opportunity to examine not only how students respond to salary levels, but also to salary trends. The existing literature has focused on the extent to which differing financial returns can affect a student's choice of undergraduate major. This paper extends the analysis to test if trends in salary levels also affect the share of students selecting into various majors using a comprehensive dataset of all post-secondary institutions. I find that students select into majors that offer higher salaries and have greater wage growth. Using a flexible empirical model that allows students to respond to both changes in salary levels and growth, I find that the results hold across majors and within engineering disciplines. These results help to explain why, for instance, the percentage of students choosing to major in computer science grew more rapidly than could be explained by salary level alone.
Author: Vasudha Rangaprasad
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
My dissertation examines the determinants of school quality and its impact on student achievement. The first essay studies the impact of class size on student achievement. The impact of class size on student achievement remains an open question despite hundreds of empirical studies and the perception amongst parents, teachers, and policymakers that larger classes are a significant detriment to student development. This essay attempts to shed new light on this ambiguity by explicitly recognizing the distributed nature of educational outcomes. This paper utilizes recently developed nonparametric tests for stochastic dominance to uniformly rank entire distributions of test scores. Moreover, by using bootstrap techniques, we are able to report the results of the dominance tests to a degree of statistical certainty. This type of analysis is very useful for policy decisions as it lends itself to broad-based, consensus ranking of outcomes. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, we estimate the effects of eighth and tenth grade class size on the unconditional and conditional distributions of contemporaneous test scores, subsequent test scores, and test score gains. The results are quite surprising. First, after controlling for a host of determinants of student achievement, we find compelling evidence suggesting that students benefit from relatively large classes. Second, we document several instances where the relationship between student achievement and class size is non-monotonic. Finally, these conclusions are unaltered when we allow for heterogeneous effects of class size by student race or subject matter. In my second essay, I address questions regarding school competition using a spatial autoregressive model. Education reforms involving expanded school choice are receiving increased attention. Many view the heightened competition that would presumably result from such reforms as a panacea for the ills currently plaguing the US public education system. However, the present system is not devoid of competition even absent such reforms; public schools compete for students through the Tiebout (1956) process. Thus, this essay seeks to answer two questions: (i) Does competition alter the behavior of public school districts? and (ii) Do public school districts compete with neighboring public school districts? To answer such questions, we utilize panel data from Illinois over the period 1990-2000 and estimate a multi-dimensional mixed regressive, spatial autoregressive model via instrumental variables, thereby eliminating the possibility of confounding strategic competition with spatial error correlation. The data come from two sources: the Common Core of Data and the Census of Population and Housing. We find robust evidence that public school districts incorporate the educational input decisions of other public school districts in the same county into their decision calculus, thereby acting strategically when setting own input levels. Thus, reforms leading to expansion of school choice would not introduce competition into the US school system, but rather would at best accentuate the level of competition. The third essay examines the impact of peer group effects on student achievement. The current empirical evidence on the magnitude of these effects is, however, inconclusive. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, I assess the impact of peer group influences on the test scores of tenth grade students using school-by-subject specific fixed effects models, as well as a Generalized Methods of Moments approach (via instrumental variables) to account for potential endogeneity of the peer group formation. The results are striking. In particular, I fail to uncover widespread evidence in favor of positive peer group effects. The OLS estimations yield strong and positive effects of peer group achievement on test score gains. When I account for potential endogeneity of peer group formation via instrumental variables and fixed effects these effects disappear. In addition, the dispersion of peer group achievement has no systematic influence on achievement growth. Moreover, I find no evidence supporting the hypothesis that peer effects have differential impacts in schools in which tracking is present. The only exception to the above findings is in models that control for both peer effects and tracking, and allow the effect of each to differ according to student ability. In this case, while the impact of tracking is not found to be substantially different in tracked versus nontracked schools, the results are consistent with a nonuniform effect of tracking on achievement across students of different abilities. Finally, these fundamental conclusions are not substantially altered when I allow for changes in the definitions of peer group effect and tracking.
Author: Justin A. Wong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This dissertation is composed of three essays. Essay 1, "Does School Start Too Early For Student Learning?", considers the connection between school start time and student performance. Biological evidence indicates that adolescents' internal clocks are designed to make them fall asleep and wake up at later times than adults. This science has prompted widespread debate about delaying school start times in the U.S., a country which has some of the earliest start times worldwide. The debate suffers, however, from a glaring absence of evidence: the small number of prior studies has been too low powered statistically to test whether later start times improve achievement. I fill the gap by studying achievement across a large, nationally representative set of high schools that have varying start times. I identify the positive effect of later clock start times, as well as the independent effect of greater daylight at school start time. My primary empirical method is cross-sectional regression with rich controls for potentially confounding variables. The findings are confirmed by regression discontinuity analysis focused on schools close to time zone boundaries. I quantify the net gain in welfare from having an additional hour of sunlight before school starts by comparing the substantial lifetime earnings benefits for students against the likely the societal costs. Essay 2, "Student Success and Teaching Assistant Effectiveness In Large Classes", considers the impact teaching assistants (TAs) have on student performance. In universities, TAs play a crucial role by providing small group instruction in lecture courses with large enrollment. The multiplicity of TAs creates both positive opportunities and negative incentives. On the one hand, some TAs may excel at tasks--such as helping struggling students--at which other TAs fail. If so, all students may be able to learn better if they can match themselves to the TA that best suits their needs. On the other hand, the multiplicity of TAs means that students in the same class often receive instruction that varies in quality even though they are ultimately graded on the same standard. In this paper, we use data from a large lecture course in which students are conditionally randomly assigned to TAs. In addition to administrative data on scores and grades, we use survey data (which we generated) on students' initial preparation, their study habits, and their interactions with TAs. We identify the existence of variation among TAs in teaching effectiveness. We also identify how TAs vary in their effectiveness with certain subpopulations of students: the least and best prepared, students with different backgrounds, and so on. Using our parameter estimates, we simulate student achievement under scenarios such as random assignment to TAs, elimination/retraining of the least effective TAs, and matching of TAs to students based on initial information to show the potential gains in student welfare from more efficient matching. Essay 3, "A Study of Student Majors: A Historical Perspective", considers whether differing financial returns across degrees are a significant factor in a student's choice of a major. During the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced a technology boom that significantly increased the initial salary offers to engineering students, and computer science students in particular. These dramatic increases in returns provide an excellent opportunity to examine not only how students respond to salary levels, but also to salary trends. The existing literature has focused on the extent to which differing financial returns can affect a student's choice of undergraduate major. This paper extends the analysis to test if trends in salary levels also affect the share of students selecting into various majors using a comprehensive dataset of all post-secondary institutions. I find that students select into majors that offer higher salaries and have greater wage growth. Using a flexible empirical model that allows students to respond to both changes in salary levels and growth, I find that the results hold across majors and within engineering disciplines. These results help to explain why, for instance, the percentage of students choosing to major in computer science grew more rapidly than could be explained by salary level alone.
Author: James Merewood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Simon Briole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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The Human Capital Theory developed by Gary Becker in the 60's substantially widened the area of investigation of economics. Over the last two decades, many studies in the economics of education intended to identify the characteristics of an educational system which enable individuals to acquire as much skills, knowledge and information as possible. This thesis contribute to this literature by studying two aspects of the educational environment that has particularly attracted economists' attention over recent years: teacher productivity and peer effects in the classroom. The first chapter of this thesis investigate to what extent teaching practices implemented by math teachers in the US relate to their students' math performance. First, it shows that every single hour spent in the classroom studying mathematics generate a significant improvement in students' math performance. Second, it shows that the productivity of instructional time strongly relates to the implementation of interactive teaching practices, which require student active participation in the lesson. More precisely, each hour spent with a teacher putting a high weight on this kind of practices is 2 to 3 times more productive than an hour spent with a teacher putting a higher weight on traditional practices, such a teacher lecture. The second chapter of this thesis studies the impact of a public policy aimed at improving teachers' practices, namely the individual teacher evaluation system in French secondary education. In this chapter, we show that students' performance at the end-of-middle school national exam significantly improve after the evaluation of their math teacher, not only for students taught by an evaluated teacher the year of the evaluation, but also for students taught by the same teacher on subsequent years, suggesting a long-lasting improvement in teacher pedagogical skills. These positive effects persist over time for students, who not only perform better at the end-of-middle school exam but also choose more often and graduate more often from the science track in high school. In addition, the positive effects of teacher evaluation are particularly salient in education priority schools, in contexts where teaching is often very challenging.The third chapter of this thesis investigates the effect of school peers' gender on students' performance and educational careers in French middle schools. First, it shows that the proportion of female peers' in middle school has persistent effects on students' educational careers as it not only affects students' test score at the end-of-9th-grade national examination, but also influences their track choices and high school graduation rates several years later. Second, it shows that a larger share of girls in the classroom has positive effects for girls and negative effects for boys. More specifically, it reduces girls' dropout rates and increases their probability to graduate from an academic track in high school, especially in the scientific track, while it increases boys' probability to attend a vocational school after 9th grade and decreases their high school graduation rate.
Author: Amy F. (Higginbotham) Godfrey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Richard Wells Patterson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 135
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Book Description
This dissertation examines various economic factors that influence student academic performance. In the first essay, I explore the role of behavioral factors in educational performance by testing whether time-management tools can improve academic outcomes for online students. I design three software tools including (1) a commitment device that allows students to pre-commit to time limits on distracting Internet activities, (2) a reminder tool that is triggered by time spent on distracting websites, and (3) a focusing tool that allows students to block distracting sites when they go to the course website. I test the impact of these tools in a large-scale randomized experiment (n=657) conducted in a massive open online course (MOOC) hosted by Stanford University. Relative to students in the control group, students in the commitment device treatment spend 24% more time working on the course, receive course grades that are 0.29 standard deviations higher, and are 40% more likely to complete the course. In contrast, outcomes for students in the reminder and focusing treatments are not statistically distinguishable from the control. These results suggest that tools designed to address procrastination can have a significant impact on online student performance. In the second essay, I examine whether trends in parenting time could help explain the black-white test score gap. I use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to examine the patterns in the time black and white children receive from mothers at each age between birth and age 14 and compare these patterns to corresponding test-score gaps documented in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K). I observe that black children spend significantly less time with their mothers than white children in the first years of life and that differences are concentrated in activities that may be especially important during these years. Differences in parenting time, however, rapidly decline with age. Contrastingly, when socioeconomic variables are controlled, black-white test score gaps are small in kindergarten, but then grow over time. The results of this study suggest that contemporaneous differences in parent time are unlikely to be a significant factor in black-white test score trends. In the third essay, coauthored with Jordan Matsudaira, I study whether charter school unionization impacts student academic outcomes. We use administrative school-level data coupled with data on the timing of union recognition collected via our own public records requests (PRR) and records of unionization from the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to construct difference-in-difference estimates the of the impact of teacher unionization on student outcomes. We find that unionization has a positive and statically significant impact on student math performance and a positive but only marginally significant impact on english performance. In our preferred estimates, we find that unions increase average grade-level math test scores by 0.17-0.21 standard deviations (SD) and English scores by 0.06-0.08 SD. These estimates allow us to rule out even modest negative effects of unionization on student academic outcomes.
Author: Katie Lynn Raynor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
The unifying theme of this dissertation is the empirical analysis of the determinants of educational success. The first essay asks whether high school time use affects the probability that a high school graduate attends college. These effects may be due to acceptance decisions by colleges or because different time uses actually change the amount of educational attainment an individual desires. Three types of high school time use are considered: doing homework outside school, participating in extracurricular activities, and working for pay. The data used for this essay, as well as for the other two essays, are from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS:88). Instrumental variables analysis suggests that the time spent on homework outside school may be the most important type of time use, and it may have a very large positive effect on four-year college attendance. The second essay identifies how high school time use affects college GPA for individuals attending their first year at four-year colleges, using the same three types of high school time use as in the previous essay. College time use is imputed using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) since this information is not available in the NELS:88. The results indicate that high school time use is important in determining GPA during the first year of college, where part of this effect is due to the fact that spending more time on homework during high school increases an individual's ability level, which later increases college GPA. The purpose of the third essay is to analyze whether living at home with one's parents will affect a college student's gradepoint average. For students from higher income families, college GPA's will be significantly higher if they live away from home. However, living at home during college does not negatively affect GPA for those from lower income families.
Author: Adam J. Ratner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781124379982
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 632
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Book Description
Having a better understanding of what factors are most influential in enhancing student achievement is crucial for effective education policy-making. This dissertation, consisting of four essays, seeks to make a contribution to the educational production literature by conducting an in-depth empirical investigation of the role of various school ecological factors in educational production using an expanded vector of student outcomes including math and reading tests, GPA, effort hours, and absences. First, the relationship between exposure to school violence and student outcomes is examined by expanding the traditional vector of inputs to include variables accounting for a student's direct exposure to school violence, the level of fear amongst students, school disciplinary structure, neighborhood safety levels, and the student's troublemaker status. The findings suggest that exposure to school violence has an impact on student outcomes similar in magnitude to more commonly investigated inputs such as parental education and student/teacher ratio. Second, a study of peer effects is conducted in a novel way through the introduction of the peer friction coefficient, representing a measure of the level of difference between the characteristics of the individual student and the average peer. Using this variable, two hypotheses are tested, which posit that the greater the level of peer friction, the less likely the student's needs are going to be met by teachers and the weaker peer effects will be. Empirical support is provided for both of these hypotheses. Third, the impact of diversity within the student population on student outcomes is explored through the innovative application of ecological diversity measures to the school environment. Specifically, Shannon's entropy is used to derive measures of racial, gender, and ability level diversity that are used as inputs into the educational production function. These measures are shown to be influential, having a differential impact between high and low achieving students. Finally, a comprehensive ecological model of educational production is derived, integrating the models of the three earlier studies, in order test for the simultaneous significance and any potential interaction between the key variables of interest. Support is found for all key variables and an extensive network of significant interactions.
Author: Joshua Aronson
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 9780120644551
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
In this book, authors discuss research and theory on the social psychological forces that shape academic achievement. A key focus is to show how psychological principles can be used to foster achievement and make schooling a more enjoyable process. Topics are highly relevant to both social and educational psychology, with discussions of core concepts such as intelligence, motivation, self-esteem and self-concept, expectations and attributions, prejudice, and interpersonal and intergroup relations.
