Author: Katie Lynn Raynor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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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: Kari Dalane
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education and state
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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The three essays in my dissertation each address topics in education policy. While they all address substantively different research questions, each provides insight into how schools are organized and run, and how this affects student experiences and outcomes. All three papers address policy-relevant questions in education related to equity. In my first essay, I focus on a recent policy development in the provision of free and reduced-price lunch called Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). CEP allows schools and districts with a certain proportion of students from low-income families to opt to provide free lunch to their entire student bodies. Using student-level administrative data from North Carolina, I find evidence that students with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) have lower levels of suspension and higher math and reading achievement in years they are enrolled in a school participating in CEP.In my second essay, I examine understudied questions in arts education in American public schools. Schools devote substantial time and resources to arts education, but little research examines how arts offerings in schools have changed over time, or which students have access to the arts. Even less credible research examines the question of how arts experiences in schools impact student outcomes. I provide insight into trends in arts education using national datasets (the Schools and Staffing Surve and the National Teacher and Principal Survey) and more detailed administrative data from one state, North Carolina. I then take up the question of how arts impacts student outcomes. The principal threat to any study of arts education is fundamental endogeneity of schools' arts curricula, and students' decisions to enroll in courses that are often elective. I estimate the impact of arts education on outcomes in a student-by-school fixed effects framework, comparing outcomes for students in years they are enrolled in arts courses to outcomes in years they are enrolled in no art courses while attending the same school. I find arts enrollment has positive impacts on attendance.In my third essay, my co-author Dave Marcotte and I examine within school segregation by income in schools in North Carolina. While recent research has examined between school income segregation, within school segregation has received relatively little attention. Since students experience school in classrooms, within school segregation is relevant to understanding how segregation overall impacts students. We generate dissimilarity indexes to measure how economically disadvantaged (ED) students and non-ED students are sorted into classrooms within schools. We then investigate whether a common policy lever, charter schools, impact levels of within school ED segregation. Traditional public school administrators could face heightened pressures to retain students when school choice options become available nearby. These pressures may encourage administrators to ramp up academic tracking or the introduce or expand specialized curricula such as gifted and talented programs. These changes could increase within school segregation. We find some evidence that within school ED segregation increases in grades 3 and 4 in traditional public schools located closest to charter schools, but little evidence of impacts in other grades.
Author: Daniel Michael O'Brien
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Author: Thomas Edward Davis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Employee fringe benefits
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Author: Arthur L. Ellis
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
ISBN: 1434993272
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Author: Walter Balfour
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Future punishment
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Author: Justin A. Wong
Publisher: Stanford University
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 121
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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: Charles Parekh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Author: Regina R. Umpstead
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education and state
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Author: Samrat Bhattacharya
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Abstract: My dissertation consists of three essays on children's skill acquisition and academic achievement. In all the essays, I use data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the supplemental Child Survey (NLSY-CHILD). In the first essay, I ask whether family structure causally affects the cognitive test scores and behavioral problems of children. I use multiple observations on each child to estimate a first-difference model and net out the effect of child- and parent-specific time-invariant unobservable factors that are correlated with both the test scores and family structure. I find no improvement in mathematics and reading test scores when mother (re)marries. There is also no decrease in these test scores when a child moved from a two biological parent to a single mother household. However, the results for the behavioral problems suggest that there might be some benefit, in terms of lower behavioral problems, of having a father in the household. In the second essay, I analyze whether delaying entry into kindergarten by an academic year helps to improve the academic performance of the delayed entrants. Every year a large number of parents hold their children out of kindergarten for an academic year although they meet the state kindergarten entry cut-offs (popularly known as "red-shirting"). I use a propensity score matching estimation (PSM) technique to estimate the effect of delaying entry into kindergarten for the delayed entrants by comparing test scores of "matched" delayed and non-delayed entrants. I find that delaying entry into kindergarten has a small but statistically significant negative effect on the reading and mathematics test scores of delayed entrants. In the third essay, I ask whether repeating a grade improves the performance of repeaters in mathematics and reading tests. I use a variant of PSM, where PSM is combined with a difference-in-difference estimator, to estimate the effect of repeating a grade for the repeaters. I find that repeating a grade actually lowers the performance on reading and mathematics tests for the repeaters, compared with how they would have performed if they had not repeated a grade.
