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Author: Lyliana Elizabeth Gayoso de Ervin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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In the third essay, I use survival analysis techniques to identify factors affecting primary school drop out by Guarani, Spanish, and bilingual speaking students. The results indicate that language-disadvantaged students, the Guarani speakers, are more likely to drop out at any grade after second grade, and the risk of dropping out is highest after sixth grade. The overall findings of this dissertation reveal that language plays an important role in educational outcomes.
Author: Lyliana Elizabeth Gayoso de Ervin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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Book Description
In the third essay, I use survival analysis techniques to identify factors affecting primary school drop out by Guarani, Spanish, and bilingual speaking students. The results indicate that language-disadvantaged students, the Guarani speakers, are more likely to drop out at any grade after second grade, and the risk of dropping out is highest after sixth grade. The overall findings of this dissertation reveal that language plays an important role in educational outcomes.
Author: Emily P. Hoffman
Publisher: W. E. Upjohn Institute
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Author: Richard Wells Patterson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 135
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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: Christelle Garrouste-Norelius
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Comparative education
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Author: William Jesse Wood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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This dissertation provides three chapters on the economics of education. In the first chapter, I provide evidence that diversifying the labor supply of teachers to better reflect the racial distribution of students improves noncognitive outcomes for students of color without diminishing outcomes for White students. I use administrative data spanning 2007 to 2017 from the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the most racially diverse school districts in the country, to measure the effect of student-teacher race matching on various noncognitive and behavior outcomes: GPA, work habits, cooperation, grade retention, suspensions, absences, and a data generated noncognitive index. I mitigate the concern that race matches are endogenous by including school-grade and student fixed effects in a linear regression model. My findings indicate that students of color are expected to experience increases in GPA, work habits, and cooperation and see decreases in suspensions and absenteeism when matched with a teacher of the same race. I do not find statistically significant effects on White students' outcomes. Because noncognitive outcomes lead to higher high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, and wages, such effects could lead to a tightening in the achievement and wage gap found between students of color and White students. This result can be achieved with an increase in institutional efforts to ensure teacher populations more closely reflect that of their students. The second chapter estimates the impact of race matched faculty (i.e., any teacher outside of a particular student's classroom) on student test scores. While the student population rapidly diversifies, the teaching corps' diversification continues to lag behind. For example, the proportion of Latino student enrollment in public schools has increased from 11 to 27 percent in just the last two decades. In contrast, the share of Latino public school teachers during this same period has increased from 3 to only 9 percent (Pew Research Center, 2021). If the disparity between student and teacher racial distributions continues to grow, students of color may find it more difficult to benefit from direct student-teacher race matching. However, it may still be possible for students to benefit from same-race teachers even if they are not placed in the same classroom. Using administrative panel data between school years 2008-09 through 2017-18 from Los Angeles Unified School District, I estimate that Latino students see positive impacts of race matched faculty. By basing this study in an area with a large proportion of Latino students and teachers, we can fill a gap within the literature by examining the effects of race match and faculty race match on Latino students. The findings indicate that matching Latino students to racially congruent teachers and faculty can improve math and English Language Arts test scores. Increasing the supply of Latino teachers may provide a crucial catalyst in decreasing the achievement gaps found between Latino and white students. The final chapter continues along the lines of educational equity. The success of many students with disabilities (SWDs) depends on access to high-quality general education teachers. Yet, most teacher value-added measures (VAMs) fail to distinguish between a teacher's effectiveness in educating students with and without disabilities. I create two VAMs: one focusing on teachers' effectiveness in improving outcomes for SWDs, and one for non-SWDs. I find top-performing teachers for non-SWDs often have relatively lower VAMs for SWDs, and SWDs sort to teachers with lower scores in both VAMs. Overall, SWD-specific VAMs may be more suitable for identifying which teachers have a history of effectiveness with SWDs and could play a role in ensuring that students are being optimally assigned to these teachers.
Author: Peter Sturmthal Bergman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 123
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I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I examine how information frictions between parents and their children affect human capital investment, and how much reducing those friction can improve student effort and achievement. I find that providing additional information to parents regarding missing assignments is a potentially cost-effective strategy to increase parental investments and improve student achievement. In Chapter 2, we measure the impact of high-quality charter schools on teen fertility using admission lotteries to several Los Angeles charter schools as a natural experiment. We find evidence that admission to high-quality charter schools can substantially reduce teen pregnancies. In Chapter 3, we semi-parametrically estimate teacher effects on student test scores using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District. We document that there is significantly more within-teacher variation in teachers' effects than across teacher variation. We find that interacting the teacher indicator variables with a function of the students' lagged test scores captures most of the nonlinearities, preserves the heterogeneity of teacher effects, and provides more accurate estimates.
Author: Elizabeth Dhuey
Publisher: ProQuest
ISBN: 9780549306092
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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The final chapter is "The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects." A continuum of ages exists at school entry due to the use of a single school cut-off date--making the "oldest" children approximately twenty percent older than the "youngest" children. We provide substantial evidence that these initial maturity differences have long lasting effects on student performance across OECD countries. In particular, the youngest members of each cohort score 4-12 percentiles lower than the oldest members in grade four and 2-9 percentiles lower in grade eight. In fact, data from Canada and the United States shows that the youngest members of each cohort are even less likely to attend university.
Author: Yusuke Jinnai
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bonuses (Employee fringe benefits)
Languages : en
Pages : 117
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"Although numerous reforms for improving public education have been proposed in the United States, the effects of implemented programs remain controversial. Focusing on recent reform policies, my dissertation examines the impact of school choice, educational accountability, and teacher performance-pay programs on student achievement. Chapter One analyzes the effects of introducing charter schools, fast-growing school-choice programs, on students at neighboring traditional public schools. Unlike prior work, which estimates the effects at the school level, this study examines the impact at the grade level by exploiting the fact that charter schools expand their grade ranges over time. I define direct impact as the impact on traditional-school students in overlapping grades and indirect impact as the impact on those in non-overlapping grades. Using student-level panel data from North Carolina, this study shows that the entry of charter schools generates a positive and significant direct impact on student achievement. Moreover, I demonstrate that one-quarter of the positive direct impact is driven by student sorting while three-quarters result from competition. Chapter Two presents evidence from a regression-discontinuity analysis of North Carolina's accountability program, in which teachers are awarded an additional cash bonus for improving their students' achievement. Results show that teachers who failed to reach an expected benchmark for their students' achievement, resulting in no bonuses, performed significantly better in the subsequent year than those who reached this benchmark and thus received a bonus. Moreover, the results demonstrate that such impact disappeared once the state government repealed the pay scheme - another indication that teachers actively respond to monetary bonuses. Chapter Three examines the performance-pay program from a different viewpoint. To date, no studies in this literature have examined the potentially negative effects of repealing incentive bonuses. This chapter exploits North Carolina's policy changes, which first reduced and finally repealed its teacher incentive bonuses. This paper shows that, as a result, student achievement at the lowest-performing schools significantly decreased after the reduction and further decreased after the repeal of the bonus. These findings illustrate that once incentives are introduced it is not cost-free to reduce or remove them"--Pages v-vi.
Author: Joshua Hollinger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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"This thesis consists of three essays on the economics of education. These essays focus on how educators affect student outcomes in the short run and long run, and they assess the effects of policies aimed at educators' incentives. Chapter 1 considers the effects of test-score-based school accountability on students' test scores and long-run outcomes, as well as the relationship between these two different types of effects. While many education policies target test scores as a contemporaneous measure of student learning, a common concern is that these policies may generate higher test scores in a way that fails to translate to more important student outcomes in the long run. I use administrative data from North Carolina and two regression discontinuity designs to estimate the impact of school accountability pressure under No Child Left Behind on elementary students' test scores and their long-run outcomes at the end of high school. I find modest positive effects on elementary test scores and a significant increase in SAT scores years later. There is some evidence for a small increase in high school GPA, mixed evidence for an increase in students intending to attend a 4-year instead of a 2-year college, and no effect on high school graduation or intention to attend any college. Further evidence suggests the effect on SAT scores may be explained by persistent test-score effects in years after accountability exposure. Altogether, these results lend support to a mixed story for No Child Left Behind: while accountability pressure led to a long-run increase in skill captured by tests, these learning gains were not strong or broad enough to yield meaningful improvements in other long-run outcomes like educational attainment. Chapter 2 evaluates the test score effects of individual teacher performance pay schemes implemented in a number of high-need schools in North Carolina. Since performance bonuses were paid to teachers with value-added above a threshold toward the top of the district-wide distribution, I evaluate whether this policy generates larger incentives for teachers with higher probability of attaining the bonus. I find evidence for the opposite: those expected to be further away from the threshold increased their value-added, though the performance incentives did not have a significant overall effect. I show that the single-year value-added estimates are quite noisy, which likely was a reason for this. I also find that almost all of the teachers in these high-need schools were predicted to have value-added below the performance threshold. Both of these factors could explain the lack of overall incentive effectiveness. One possibility is that lower value-added teachers have more scope to improve effort. Chapter 3 addresses the questions of whether the assignment of less effective teachers contributes to worse short-term and longer-term outcomes for disadvantaged students. We leverage transfers of elementary teachers across schools in North Carolina to measure differences in teachers' effects on contemporaneous and future test scores according to students' socio-economic characteristics. We quantify the importance of these differences to account for the observed test score gaps between disadvantaged and advantaged students. Variation in teacher quality accounts for 3% of the total variation in contemporaneous test scores. We also find that teacher quality accounts for similar proportions when we consider variability in test scores taken two and three years after. Our estimates are robust to bias-correction methods that account for limited mobility bias."--Pages viii-ix.
Author: Eric S. Taylor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Across three papers I study how differences in the quality and quantity of classroom instruction contribute to differences in what students learn in school. The first two papers focus on teachers--specifically what gives rise to differences between teachers in student learning. The third paper focuses on the quantity of instruction time students receive. The results are immediately relevant to both ongoing education policy debates about teaching quality and the day-to-day management of a large workforce. First, in paper one, I study the effects of a labor-replacing computer technology on the productivity of classroom teachers. In a series of field-experiments, teachers were provided computer-aided instruction (CAI) software for use in their classrooms; CAI provides individualized tutoring and practice to students one-on-one. In math classes, CAI reduces by one-fifth the variance of teacher productivity, as measured by student test score gains. The smaller variance comes both from productivity improvements for otherwise low-performing teachers, but also losses among high-performers. The change in productivity partly reflects changes in teachers' level of work effort and teachers' decisions about how to allocate class time. Second, I study whether and how teachers' assigned job tasks--the basic instructional practices they are asked to use in the classroom--affect the returns to math skills in teacher productivity. The empirical results demonstrate the value distinguishing between workers' skills and the job tasks to which those skills are applied, as in Acemoglu and Autor (2011). I use data from a randomized-trial of different approaches to teaching early-elementary math, each approach codified in a set of day-to-day tasks for teachers; the data include a baseline test of each teacher's math skills--knowledge of math concepts, procedures, and pedagogy. Teacher productivity, as measured by contributions to student math test score growth, is increasing in math skills when teachers are asked to follow conventional "direct-instruction" practices which rely on teachers explaining and modeling math rules and procedures for their students. The relationship is weaker, perhaps even negative, when teachers use newer "student-led" practices. The difference in productivity is pronounced for the high-skilled (top-tercile) teachers where the difference between direct-instruction and student-led is 0.13-0.16 student standard deviations. Additionally, assigning teachers to use student-led practices reduces the total variation in productivity by one-third or more compared to direct-instruction. Finally, for students whose math skills lag expectations, public schools often increase the fraction of the school day spent on math instruction. Studying middle-school students and using regression discontinuity methods, I estimate the causal effect of requiring two math classes--one remedial, one regular--instead of just one class. Math achievement grows much faster under the requirement, 0.16-0.18 student standard deviations. Yet, one year after returning to a regular one-class schedule, the initial gains decay by as much as half, and two years later just one-third of the initial treatment effect remains. This pattern of decaying effects over time mirrors other educational interventions--assignment to a more skilled teacher, reducing class size, retaining students--but spending more time on math carries different costs. One cost is notable, more time in math crowds out instruction in other subjects.
