Scheduled to Gain: Short- and Longer-Run Educational Effects of Examination Scheduling*

In this paper, I present findings concerning the effect of examination scheduling on high-stakes exam scores and longer-run outcomes. I show that random variations in examination schedules, which increase the time students have to prepare, have positive effects on exam scores. The effect is highly concave, and stronger for females and in quantitative subjects. I trace the effects of preparation time into tertiary education outcomes, finding significant effects for female students on the extensive and intensive margins. I show how easily exam scores and, consequently, longer-run outcomes are affected by a random institutional factor unrelated to student ability.     

SOCIAL ANIMAL HOUSE: THE ECONOMIC AND ACADEMIC CONSEQUENCES OF FRATERNITY MEMBERSHIP

We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small Northeastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student grade point average by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional 4‐point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members. Alcohol‐related behavior does not explain much of the effects of fraternity membership on either the human capital or social capital effects. These findings suggest that college administrators face significant trade‐offs when crafting policies related to Greek life on campus. (JEL I23, J24, I12)     

MARCH MADNESS: NCAA TOURNAMENT PARTICIPATION AND COLLEGE ALCOHOL USE

While athletic success may improve the visibility of a university to prospective students and thereby benefit the school, it may also increase risky behavior in the current student body. Using the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, we find that a school's participation in the NCAA Basketball Tournament is associated with a 47% increase in binge drinking by male students at that school. Additionally, we find evidence that drunk driving increases by 5% among all students during the tournament. (JEL I12, I23, Z28)     

School composition effects in Denmark: quantile regression evidence from PISA 2000

Data from the first wave of the OECD PISA study are combined with register data for Denmark to estimate the effect of the socioeconomic mix of schools on students’ test scores. A major disadvantage of the PISA design for the analysis of school composition effects is the small students-per-school samples. Adding family background data from administrative registers for all same-aged schoolmates of the PISA students helps overcome this. To compensate for endogeneity in the school composition variable, the results are conditioned on a rich set of family and school variables from the PISA data. Quantile regression results suggest differential school composition effects across the conditional reading score distribution, with students in the lower quantiles achieving the largest test score gains. Mathematics results suggest that high- and low-ability students benefit equally from attending schools with a better student intake, and most results for science are only marginally significant. These results imply that mixing students of different home backgrounds could improve equity of achievement for both reading and mathematics; however, the average skill level would improve only for reading literacy. In mathematics, mixing students would not raise average outcomes, because the detrimental effect on students in the higher quantiles would offset positive effects on those in the lower quantiles. I thank Amelie Constant, Bernd Fitzenberger, Eskil Heinesen, Peter Jensen, Craig Riddell, Michael Rosholm, Nina Smith, Robert Wright and participants at the ESPE and EALE 2003 conferences and at AKF seminars, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. Financial support provided by the Danish Social Science Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.     

Relative Age,Class Assignment,and Academic Performance: Evidence from Brazilian Primary Schools

Students in Brazil are typically assigned to classes based on the age ranking in their cohort. I exploit this rule to estimate how fifth‐grade students’ achievement in mathematics is affected when they are in classes with older peers. I find that being assigned to the older class leads to a drop in maths scores of about 0.4 of a standard deviation for students at the cut‐off. I provide evidence that heterogeneity in age is an important factor behind this effect. Information on teaching practices and student behaviour sheds light on how class heterogeneity harms learning.     

Students Cheat More: Comparing the Dishonesty of a Student Sample and a Representative Sample in the Laboratory*

Unethical behavior has been found in numerous experiments, yet mainly among university students. The use of student participants is potentially problematic for generalizability and the resulting policy recommendations. In this paper, I report on an experiment with potential dishonesty. The experiment was completed by a representative non-student sample and a student sample. The results show that cheating does exist, but also that students cheat systematically more. This suggests that focusing on students as participants tends to overestimate the magnitude of cheating. I further find that age is an important explanation for this difference in dishonesty. The older the participants are, the less they cheat.     

Encouraging Tutorial Attendance at University Did Not Improve Performance

When tertiary education is subsidised the cost of poor student performance in university subjects falls not only on the individual student but also on society in general. Society therefore has an interest in promoting student performance. There is evidence in the literature that absenteeism from university classes is widespread and that absenteeism adversely affects student performance. In this paper I describe an incentive scheme that increased attendance of business and economics students in an introductory statistics subject at a typical Australian university. Like other authors I find a strong positive association between attendance and academic performance, both in the presence and absence of the scheme. However, there is no evidence that the incentive scheme caused student performance to improve. Although students attended more classes they did not perform better than students in the previous year's class who had the same observable characteristics and attendance levels but who were not exposed to the scheme.     

Resources and Student Achievement—Evidence from a Swedish Policy Reform*

A policy change is used to estimate the effect of teacher density on student performance. We find that an increase in teacher density has a positive effect on student achievement. The baseline estimate—obtained by using the grade‐point average as the outcome variable—implies that resource increases corresponding to the class‐size reduction in the STAR experiment (a reduction of seven students) improves performance by 2.6 percentile ranks (or 0.08 standard deviations). When we used test‐score data for men, potentially a more objective measure of student performance, the effect of resources appears to be twice as large.     

Accountability,incentives and behavior: the impact of high-stakes testing in the Chicago Public Schools

The recent federal education bill, No Child Left Behind, requires states to test students in grades 3 to 8 each year and to judge school performance on the basis of these test scores. While intended to maximize student learning, there is little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of such policies. This study examines the impact of an accountability policy implemented in the Chicago Public Schools in 1996–1997. Using a panel of student-level, administrative data, I find that math and reading achievement increased sharply following the introduction of the accountability policy, in comparison to both prior achievement trends in the district and to changes experienced by other large, urban districts in the mid-west. However, for younger students, the policy did not increase performance on a state-administered, low-stakes exam. An item-level analysis suggests that the observed achievement gains were driven by increases in test-specific skills and student effort. I also find that teachers responded strategically to the incentives along a variety of dimensions—by increasing special education placements, preemptively retaining students and substituting away from low-stakes subjects like science and social studies.     

Parental occupation and children’s school outcomes in math.

We investigate the relationship between math attitude and students’ math scores using data obtained from PISA 2012 and a 2SLS model. Math attitude is approximated by an indicator that takes into account intangible (parental attitude, student instrumental motivation and student math anxiety) and tangible (parental help in math homework) factors. The presence of one family member in a math-related career is our instrumental variable. We find that an increase of one standard deviation in math attitude increases the student score by approximately 30 points, a relevant effect since 40 points is the equivalent of one year of schooling.     

DOES ATHLETIC SUCCESS INFLUENCE PERSISTENCE AT HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS? NEW EVIDENCE USING PANEL DATA

This study examines the relationship between athletic success and student persistence toward a degree. We build an updated panel of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I institutions and utilize within‐institution variation to identify the effects of athletic success. Using a ranking of all institutions, we find that having more successful men's basketball and football teams has a significant positive effect on first‐year retention rates. We also find some evidence that improved basketball rankings increase graduation rates, and that success in the NCAA tournament may have a sizable impact on retention. Although the estimated effects are generally modest in scale, we find rather limited evidence of other institutional factors affecting persistence, suggesting that athletics can be one avenue for institutions of higher education to engage and retain students. (JEL I23, Z20, L83)     

International student migration to Germany

The past decades have witnessed an impressive growth of international student mobility. This article presents first empirical evidence on international student migration to Germany, one of the most important destination countries for international students worldwide. While previous research in the field has mainly used data on international trade in educational services, I use a novel approach that analyzes student mobility as a form of migration, using data on international student migrants. An augmented gravity equation is the basis for the theoretical and empirical framework. I also provide extensive sensitivity checks of the empirical results and estimates using both the usual log-linearized and a multiplicative specification of the gravity equation, following recent work by Santos Silva and Tenreyro (Rev Econ Stat 88(4): 641–658, 2006). The results provide evidence for the importance of distance—a familiar result from the empirical migration literature. Unlike for international migration on the whole, the importance of disposable income in the home country does not seem to be too big for students, and student migrant flows from politically unfree countries are significantly lower.     

On the peer effects of star students

We estimate the effect that star students have on their siblings’ learning outcomes, measured by their high school grade point average (GPA) and their math grades. To this end, we couple administrative school data on grades with an unusual natural experiment in Peru that generates exogenous variation in the presence of star students at home. We find that star students increase their siblings’ GPA by 0.33 SDs and their math grades by 0.22 SDs. The effect size is inversely related to number of siblings, suggesting that the remaining siblings act as substitutes for the star student.     

The Life-Cycle Pattern of Collegiate GPA: Longitudinal Cohort Analysis and Grade Inflation

Individual semester-by-semester undergraduate grade point average for each of the eight semesters of the collegiate academic life cycle for five entire student cohorts for the classes of 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002 at a large, private university in the northeast (N = 12,663) reveal a "check-mark" pattern: students' grades fell in the second semester, rose thereafter, and slumped in the last academic term. Attrition and participation in the Greek system explain over half of the longitudinal change in academic achievement. A comparison of the five cohorts of students indicates a rate of grade inflation comparable to that obtained for multischool studies covering the period 1960 to the late 1990s.     

The price effects of joining the euro: modelling the Greek experience using non-linear price-adjustment models

The widely-held hypothesis that accession to the EMU has caused a structural increase in Greek consumer prices is tested. No econometric evidence of such an effect is found. There is strong evidence of (a) multiple structural breaks in the process driving Greek equilibrium consumer prices and (b) non-linear price adjustment. The findings explain the post-EMU accession acceleration in Greek prices as normal, equilibrium-restoring behaviour. They also have important policy implications for the countries planning to join the euro in the foreseeable future.     

A Student Learning Inventory for Economics Based on the Students' Experience of Learning: A Preliminary Study

The authors present the initial development of a student learning inventory (SLI) that is specific to economics. This approach, which is based on the student experience of learning (SEL) literature, emphasizes aspects of prior knowledge in the learning history of entering first-year students. Preliminary insights from a first SLI suggest that on entry to university, students show considerable variation in their perceptions of what economics is and what economists do. From the SEL perspective, such variation affects student learning. It is argued that continued development of an economic-specific SLI may result in a better understanding of students' learning engagement with economics and ultimately assist instructors in better understanding student learning difficulties and increase student success in first-year economics.     

Student participation in sporting activities

Given that many universities spend large sum of money supplying sports facilities for student use, comparatively little is known about the factors that influence the quantity of student sporting participation. This article presents evidence which suggests that the quantity of student sports participation is negatively related to the number of hours they work, while augmenting social capital and sports literacy are found to enhance their sports participation. Universities need to target their investment in sporting facilities to meet students’ demands and not simply to increase the range of sports facilities available to students.     

新时期高校学生实习期学生工作探究

高等院校承担着为国家和人民培养合格的工作者和建设者的重任。实习是锻炼学生实践能力、检验学校教学效果基本形式。大学生实习时间长短不一,实习地点分散。决定论大学生实习期间的教育和管理有着存在阶段性、特殊性。针对高等院校实习期学生工作存在的问题,就如何构建学生实习期学生工作的有效途径,有效延伸高等院校学生工作的覆盖面,加强对实习学生的管理进行了有益探索。     

TRACING THE EFFECTS OF GUARANTEED ADMISSION THROUGH THE COLLEGE PROCESS: EVIDENCE FROM A POLICY DISCONTINUITY IN THE TEXAS 10% PLAN

The Texas 10% law states that students who graduated among the top 10% of their high school class are guaranteed admission to public universities in Texas. We estimate the causal effects of this admissions guarantee on a sequence of connected decisions: students' application behavior, admission decisions by the university, students' enrollment choices conditional on admission; as well as the resulting college achievement. We identify these effects by comparing students just above and just below the top 10% rank cut off. We assume that other student characteristics and incentives are continuous at this cut off. We find that students react to incentives created by the admissions guarantee—for example, by reducing applications to competing private universities. The effects of the admissions guarantee depend on the university and the type of students it attracts. The 10% law is binding and alters the decisions of the admissions committees. We find little evidence that the law increases diversity or leads to meaningful mismatch for the marginal student admitted. (JEL I23, I28)     

Subsidizing heterogeneous higher education systems

In many countries, there is an ongoing debate on the public funding of the higher education (HE) system. Our goal is to examine the theoretical justification for the establishment of HE institutions and analyze the self-selection of students under different policies of student subsidies. We study nonstationary equilibria of an overlapping-generation economy in a hierarchical education system. Given the capacity constraints of Universities, we explore the impact of adding new institutions, to be called Colleges, to the HE system, focusing on three issues. Given that Colleges are less productive and less selective than Universities: (a) Should the government establish Colleges? (b) Should the government divert funds from Universities to Colleges? On the basis of long-run economic growth considerations, we obtain positive answers to both questions. (c) Then, we compare several policies of student subsidies across the board. Our results suggest that much caution is needed in the implementation of student subsidies. Specifically, targeting subsidies to the highly-ranked students in each institution may distort their self-selection across institutions and downgrade the human capital accumulation in the economy. To offset this distortion in the demand for HE it may be useful to target subsidies to the low-ranked students in each institution. Our model also accounts for several stylized facts over time: (1) the increase in the number of institutions and students, (2) the decline in College admission standards, and (3) the decline in public budget per student and the corresponding increase in out-of-pocket student payments.