How does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings? Evidence from Project Star

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27, but this effect is imprecisely estimated. Second, students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings. Third, an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings. Students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades K–3—as measured by classmates' end-of-class test scores—have higher earnings, college attendance rates, and other outcomes. Finally, the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades, but gains in noncognitive measures persist.     

MacroJournal—Turning Students into Practitioners

Incorporating currents events into an economics curriculum is a goal of many dedicated instructors. The benefits of doing so are obvious. Unfortunately, the costs associated with implementation are nontrivial. In the following, the authors introduce an experiential writing assignment, called the MacroJournal, which streamlines the process of incorporating current events into a macroeconomics course. The costs for the instructor are mitigated by a repeated structure of questioning and a well-defined grading rubric. By completing the assignment, students have an opportunity to become practitioners and link current events to classroom theory.     

Tweeting Your Way to Improved #Writing, #Reflection,and #Community

Economics appears to be lagging behind other fields in the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. Twitter is an online microblogging utility, permitting posts of up to 140 characters called tweets. The utility is rapidly making its way into secondary and post-secondary classrooms as a complement to traditional instruction and an active learning tool. In this article, the author describes how Twitter was employed as a complement to traditional lecture in a small macroeconomics principles course (the instrument is applicable to courses at any level). The brevity of the tweets forces students to express their thoughts concisely and is believed to develop reflection and writing skills while expanding the class community.     

Migrant peers in the classroom: Is the academic performance of local students negatively affected?

This paper provides the first causal estimates of the impact of internal migrant peers on the academic performance of local students in developing countries. By exploiting the random assignment of students to classes within a school, I find that migrant peers have large and negative effects on the academic performance of local students in China and the negative spillover effects are concentrated among male students and among local students in large cities. The investigation of the underlying mechanisms suggests that the negative migrant spillover effects may come from the worsened learning environment or from the adjustment of teachers’ pedagogical practices in response to the migrant composition in the classroom.     

A classroom experiment in monetary policy

The authors propose a classroom experiment implementing a simple version of a New Keynesian model suitable for courses in intermediate macroeconomics and money and banking. Students play as either the central bank or members of the private sector. The central banker sets interest rates to meet twin objectives for inflation and the output gap or to meet only an inflation target. In both settings, private sector agents are concerned with correctly forecasting the inflation rate. The authors show that an experiment implementing this setup is feasible and yields results that enhance understanding of the New Keynesian model of monetary policy. They propose alternative versions where the central bank is replaced by a policy rule and provide suggestions for discussing the experimental results with students.     

Comment

How well does competitive theory explain the outcome in experimental markets. The authors examined the results of a large number of classroom trading experiments that used a pit-trading design found in Experiments with Economic Principles, an introductory economics textbook by Bergstrom and Miller. They compared experimental outcomes with predictions of competitive-equilibrium theory and with those of a simple profit-splitting theory. Neither theory was entirely successful in explaining the data, although in the first rounds of trading there was significant profit splitting and, as traders became more experienced, outcomes were closer to those predicted by competitive theory.     

AN EMPIRICAL MODEL OF LEARNING UNDER AMBIGUITY: THE CASE OF CLINICAL TRIALS*

This article presents a two‐dimensional structural model of learning under ambiguity in the context of clinical trials. Clinical trials offer an ideal environment to study learning under ambiguity. The randomization process found in these studies leaves patients uncertain to their actual group assignment. Therefore, patients cannot immediately attribute changes in health to the experimental drug. The article proposes the use of “learning instrumental variables” to simultaneously update patients’ beliefs of the treatment effect and group assignment. Patient learning is found to be faster when observable side effects are incorporated to account for the uncertainty in group assignment.     

A Rent-Seeking Experiment for the Classroom

Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that active learning techniques improve student comprehension and retention of abstract economic ideas such as rent seeking. Instructors can reinforce the concept of rent seeking with a classroom game, particularly one involving real money. The authors improve upon a game first introduced by Goeree and Holt (1999) and later expanded upon by Bischoff and Hofmann (2002). The authors present a version of the game in which students participate in an all-pay auction, risking their own money, and discover first hand the potential inefficiencies of rent seeking. The authors suggest extensions of the rent-seeking game, including discussions of social welfare effects, equity, campaign finance reform, tax simplification, and congressional reforms designed to limit the influence of rent seeking in the economy.     

Enhancing economic literacy of classroom teachers

For the past two summers, the Division of Education and the Division of Business and Economics at Indiana University at Kokomo have collaborated to produce an intense teamtaught summer economics course for pre-service education majors and in-service classroom teachers. The dual emphasis on content and application allows economics to integrate every aspect of the classroom and allows Praxis achievement. This paper explores the essential nature of Praxis in making the content or practice link—so critical for successful implementation of economics in K-12 classrooms. To determine their attitudes toward and knowledge of economics education, a pretest and post-test format was adopted. In addition, the institutional enhancers and inhibitors that dramatically affected the development and implementation of the new course of study are presented. This paper was presented at the Forty-Fourth International Atlantic Economic Society Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 9–12, 1997. Discussants' comments are incorporated.     

合作学习打破大学英语课堂沉默的有效性研究

大学生消极的课堂沉默是多种因素共同作用的结果，不利于学生英语综合应用能力的培养和提高。合作学习以建构主义和人本主义理论为基础，强调学生的主体参与和生生之间的互动合作，既是一种有效的学习模式，也是一种新型的教学组织形式。以定量和定性的方式探讨了合作学习和传统教学模式跟课堂沉默的关系。研究表明，“以学生为中心”的合作学习对打破大学英语课堂沉默有明显效果，而“以教师为中心”的传统教学模式不仅会导致课堂沉默，而且会在一定程度上加重课堂沉默的程度。