Barriers to skill acquisition in Brazil: Public and private school students performance in a public university entrance exam

This paper uses a novel data set to quantify the difference in performance of public and private school students in an entrance test exam of the major public university in Brazilian Northeast (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco – UFPE). Although there are many public universities in Brazil, from our knowledge, there is no study that uses data on entrance test scores at such universities to evaluate the determinants of students’ performance and the barriers for public school students to get in the good universities. The data set has detailed information on individual and school characteristics, and family background. We found that test scores of public school students are on average about 4.2–17% lower than those taken by private school students, depending on the set of controls. This result is robust when we address problems related to attrition, omitted variables (e.g., cognitive ability), and unobservable selectivity. We also show that once students get into the university, those from public schools perform as well as those from private schools. In addition, the proportion of public school students that gets into the university is roughly the same as the proportion of students doing the entrance exam. However, there is a strong barrier for public school students to get into high competitive majors. The fraction of students from public schools that gets into high competitive majors such as law, medicine, and electronic engineering is almost null. Our findings provide quantitative evidence to the common view that the Brazilian elitist high education system is an important channel for inequality persistence.     

The Effectiveness of Single‐Sex Schools through Out‐of‐School Activities: Evidence from South Korea

Students’ out‐of‐school activities and time use can play a crucial role in facilitating the effect of schools on students’ achievement. Using data from Seoul, South Korea, where students are randomly assigned into schools, we show that when single‐sex schools improve students’ test performance, their effect is positive on students’ time spent on study‐related out‐of‐school activities. Our results indicate that out‐of‐school activities explain roughly 21%–30% of the effect of single‐sex schooling on test performance.     

A finite‐sample hierarchical analysis of wage variation across public high schools: evidence from the NLSY and high school and beyond

Using data from both the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and High School and Beyond (HSB), we investigate if public high schools differ in the “production” of earnings and if rates of return to future education vary with public high school attended. Given evidence of such variation, we seek to explain why schools differ by proposing that standard measures of school “quality” as well as proxies for community characteristics can explain the observed parameter variation across high schools. Since analysis of widely‐used data sets such as the NLSY and HSB necessarily involves observing only a few students per high school, we employ an exact finite sample estimation approach. We find evidence that schools differ and that most proxies for high school quality play modest roles in explaining the variation in outcomes across public high schools. We do find evidence that the education of the teachers in the high school as well as the average family income associated with students in the school play a small part in explaining variation at the school‐level. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Graduates,Dropouts and Slow Finishers: The Effects of Credit Constraints on University Outcomes

The effect of credit constraints on university outcomes is studied. Credit constraints have a negative relationship with dropout, especially on lower achieving high school graduates. Credit constrained students with strong high school achievement are 13–15% more (less) likely to graduate (be slow finishers) relative to otherwise similar students who are potentially or unlikely constrained. Using competing risk analysis, we find dropout is most likely in the first year of study and falls over time for all students. After 3 years of study, the risk of dropout increases for students who are constrained suggesting constraints may eventually bind on these students.     

梅州市部分职业学校篮球教学的现状与对策研究

篮球运动是在我国普及度较高的一项体育项目,也是各个学校体育教学中的主要课程,篮球教学的效果主要是取决于教师的教学方法和学生的学习兴趣,篮球教学的教学质量直接影响着学生能否掌握这种运动项目,所以,很有必要在职业学校里开设这门课程,对提高学生的体育锻炼水平和对学生的健康成长有重要意义,目前我国的体育运动在逐渐的向"终身体育"转变,因此,各个职业学校的篮球教学也必须做出相应的改革。对目前的职业学校的篮球教学现状进行调查,通过研究发现在职业学校中篮球教学中存在的问题,并采取措施解决在教学中出现的问题。     

Do dropouts suffer from dropping out? Estimation and prediction of outcome gains in generalized selection models

In this paper we describe methods for predicting distributions of outcome gains in the framework of a latent variable selection model. We describe such procedures for Student‐t selection models and a finite mixture of Gaussian selection models. Importantly, our algorithms for fitting these models are simple to implement in practice, and also permit learning to take place about the non‐identified cross‐regime correlation parameter. Using data from High School and Beyond, we apply our methods to determine the impact of dropping out of high school on a math test score taken at the senior year of high school. Our results show that selection bias is an important feature of this data, that our beliefs about this non‐identified correlation are updated from the data, and that generalized models of selectivity offer an improvement over the ‘textbook’ Gaussian model. Further, our results indicate that on average dropping out of high school has a large negative impact on senior‐year test scores. However, for those individuals who actually drop out of high school, the act of dropping out of high school does not have a significantly negative impact on test scores. This suggests that policies aimed at keeping students in school may not be as beneficial as first thought, since those individuals who must be induced to stay in school are not the ones who benefit significantly (in terms of test scores) from staying in school. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Educational Development in South Sudan: Conscious Design or Spontaneous Order?

Educational development is key to the future prosperity of South Sudan. Officially the situation appears bleak with up to 50 per cent of primary‐aged children out of school, high reported dropout rates and poor attainment. Those involved in the development of education, government departments, international agencies, individuals and communities are each following one of two different approaches as they seek to extend the reach of education. The article suggests that these different approaches arise because those involved hold to either a conscious‐design or a spontaneous‐order model for educational development. The article looks at the recent development of schools in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, in the light of these two theories and finds, despite the rhetoric of the official reports, that most growth is organic and that most recent educational development is emerging spontaneously.     

The Business School ‘Business’: Some Lessons from the US Experience*

US business schools dominate the business school landscape, particularly for the MBA degree. This fact has caused schools in other countries to imitate the US schools as a model for business education. But US business schools face a number of problems, many of them a result of offering a value proposition that primarily emphasizes the career‐enhancing, salary‐increasing aspects of business education as contrasted with the idea of organizational management as a profession to be pursued out of a sense of intrinsic interest or even service. We document some of the problems confronting US business schools and show how many of these arise from a combination of a market‐like orientation to education coupled with an absence of a professional ethos. In this tale, there are some lessons for educational organizations both in the US and elsewhere that are interested in learning from the US experience.     

The impact of Chicago’s small high school initiative

This project examines the effects of the introduction of new small high schools on student performance in the Chicago Public School (CPS) district. Specifically, we investigate whether students attending small high schools have better graduation/enrollment rates and achievement than similar students who attend regular CPS high schools. We show that students who choose to attend a small school are more disadvantaged on average, including having prior test scores that are about 0.2 standard deviations lower than their elementary school classmates. To address the selection problem, we use an instrumental variables strategy and compare students who live in the same neighborhoods but differ in their residential proximity to a small school. In this approach, one student is more likely to sign up for a small school than another statistically identical student because the small school is located closer to the student’s house and therefore the “cost” of attending the school is lower. The distance-to-small-school variable has strong predictive power to identify who attends a small school. We find that small schools students are substantially more likely to persist in school and eventually graduate. Nonetheless, there is no positive impact on student achievement as measured by test scores.     

Dropout in secondary education: an application of a multilevel discrete-time hazard model accounting for school changes

For several decades, researchers have focused on dropout in search for an explanation and prevention of this phenomenon. However, past research is characterized by methodological shortcomings. Most of this research was conducted without considering the hierarchical structure of educational data and ignored the longitudinal path towards dropout. Moreover, research that did take into account these shortcomings, did not correct for student mobility between schools, despite the strong correlation with dropout (South et al. 2007). In this study, we attempt to address these shortcoming by implementing a multilevel discrete-time hazard model and exploring the effect of different school classifications on the school effects. Partially analogous to Grady and Beretvas (2010) we compare models with estimated school effects based on the first and on the last school attended and compare these models with multiple membership models and cross-classified models. The results of this comparison indicate that ignoring student mobility can have strong implications on the predictors of dropout. Not only do models which take into account this mobility yield better model fits, models ignoring this mobility tend to miss the effect of school level variables. With respect to the conclusions on dropout research, our models provide evidence for the often cited student characteristics predicting dropout and indicate stronger school effects than generally assumed.     

Closing schools in a shrinking district: Do student outcomes depend on which schools are closed?

In the last decade, many cities around the country have needed to close schools due to declining enrollments and low achievement. School closings raise concerns about the possible negative impacts on student achievement, neighborhoods, families, and teaching staff. This study examines an anonymous urban district that, faced with declining enrollment, chose to make student achievement a major criterion in determining which schools would be closed. The district targeted low-performing schools in its closure plan, and sought to move their students to higher-performing schools. We estimate the impact of school closures on student test scores and attendance rates by comparing the growth of these measures among students differentially affected by the closures. We use residential assignment to school as an instrument to address non-random sorting of students into new schools. We also statistically control for the contemporaneous effects of other reforms within the district. Results show that students displaced by school closures can experience adverse effects on test scores and attendance, but these effects can be minimized when students move to schools that are higher-performing (in value-added terms). Moreover, the negative effect on attendance disappears after the first year in the new school. Meanwhile, we find no adverse effects on students in the schools that are receiving the transferring students.     

转变中职学生数学学习方法之尝试

中职学生难教，中职数学更难教。这其中有家庭、学校的原因，也有社会的原因；有教师教学方法方面的问题，也有学生学习方法方面的问题。文章主要介绍笔者在转变中职学生数学学习方法方面的一些尝试。     

SCHOOLING FOR MONEY: SWEDISH EDUCATION REFORM AND THE ROLE OF THE PROFIT MOTIVE

This paper analyses quantitative evidence on the performance of for‐profit schools in Sweden. It finds that school competition improved educational attainment and conditions for teachers. The benefits of competition were enhanced by the high number of for‐profit schools that were established.     

Using Compulsory Mobility to Identify School Quality and Peer Effects

Education production functions that feature school and student fixed effects are identified using students' school mobility. However, student mobility is driven by factors like parents' labour market shocks and divorce. Movers experience large achievement drops, are more often minority and free meal students, and sort endogenously into peer groups and school types. We exploit an English institutional feature whereby some students must change schools between grades 2 and 3. We find no evidence of endogenous sorting of such compulsory movers across peer groups or school types. Non‐compulsory movers bias school quality estimates downward by as much as 20% of a SD.     

Using DEA for measuring teachers’ performance and the impact on students’ outcomes: evidence for Spain

This research contributes to the ongoing debate about differences in teachers’ performance. We introduce a new methodology that combines production frontier and impact evaluation insights that allows using DEA as an identification strategy of a treatment with high and low quality teachers within schools to assess their performance. We use a unique database of primary schools in Spain that, for every school, supplies information on two classrooms at 4th grade where students and teachers were randomly assigned into the two classrooms. We find considerable differences in teachers’ efficiency across schools with significant effects on students’ achievement. In line with previous findings, we find that neither teacher experience nor academic training explains teachers’ efficiency. Conversely, being a female teacher, having worked five or more years in the same school or having smaller class sizes positively affects the performance of teachers.     

Maximum likelihood estimation of seemingly unrelated stochastic frontier regressions

This paper explores the changes in value added (VA) of a sample of schools for cohorts of students finishing secondary education between 2005 and 2008. VA estimates are based on distance measures obtained from DEA models. These measures are computed for each pupil in each school, and evaluate the distance between the school frontier in a given year and a pooled frontier comprising all schools analysed. The school VA is then computed by aggregating the VA scores for the cohort of pupils attending that school in a given year. The ratio between VA estimates for two consecutive cohorts, that attended the school in different years, is taken as the index of VA change. However, the evolution of school performance over time should consider not only the movements of the school frontier, but should also take into account other effects, such as the proximity of the students to the best-practices, represented by the school frontier, observed over time. For that purpose we developed an enhanced Malmquist index to evaluate the evolution of school performance over time. One of the components of the Malmquist index proposed measures VA change, and the other measures the ability of all school students to move closer to their own school best practices over time. The approach developed is applied to a sample of Portuguese secondary schools.     

DEA方法在学习成绩相对有效性评价中的应用

针对目前教育体制中的一些问题,运用数据包络分析(DEA)方法,对学生学习成绩的相对有效性进行评价,为学校考核学生成绩提出更公平有效的方法,从而提升学校对学生的管理水平。     

英语教学中需要倾注人文关怀

英语教学要面向全体学生,关注学生的情感和潜能的发挥。多年以来,很多学校学生经过初中三年的英语学习,实际效果并不好,很重要的一个原因在于长期以来,在教学实践中片面重视知识传授和认知能力的发展,忽视具有动力作用的情感,影响学生学习的积极性。由此可见英语教学中还需要对学生倾注更多的人文关怀。     

The development of a model for student achievement

This article describes the results of work being conducted on the development of a model for student achievement. Steps employed in the reduction of the large number of variables into a fewer number of indices and the utilization of these indices in regression analyses are described. Some of the more salient findings are that both school achievement and school resources (including such things as the number of pupils per teacher, the teacher's view of his working conditions and the school's special staff and services) are highly related to the socio-economic status and racial-ethnic composition of the student body. The influence of the schools is bound up with the kinds of students that they get initially. Consequently, when the schools are equated for the kinds of students that they get they tend also to be equated for the influence that they have on these students. The schools play an important role in promoting student achievement and the extent of this involvement appears to be greater for higher socio-economic status and white students than for lower socio-economic status and non-white students.     

在生物实验教学中渗透心理健康教育

心理问题在中学生群体中普遍存在,并对他们的学习和生活产生很多不良的影响。本文详细讲述了中学生的一些心理问题在中学生物实验中的表现及危害,以及在中学生物实验教学中渗透心理健康教育的重要作用和相关策略。