DOES TEACHER‐FAMILY EXPERIENCE AFFECT TEST SCORES?

Since families play a pivotal role in elementary schools, student learning may be influenced by how well the teacher knows a family and how well the parents know the teacher. We test this hypothesis by evaluating whether assignment to a teacher who has previously taught an older sibling affects test scores. We refer to teachers who have previously taught the older sibling as having “teacher‐family experience” when teaching the younger sibling. Using a novel data set that includes administrative data on students and teachers matched to family identifiers, we find that when the older sibling's teacher is teaching in the younger sibling's grade, 40% of younger siblings are assigned their older sibling teachers. We find that teacher‐family experience does not have any significant effects on test scores and we can statistically rule out small effects. (JEL I20)     

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.     

Heterogeneity, Job Creation and Unemployment Volatility

In this paper, I explore the impact of match‐specific heterogeneity at the job creation margin on business cycle fluctuations. I show that this form of heterogeneity alone does not help to amplify labor market volatility, either under full or under asymmetric information. First, I show analytically that, under full information, heterogeneity has no first‐order effect on the response of unemployment and job creation to productivity, and actually tends to dampen the response of market tightness. Then, in a series of calibrations, I show that with both full and asymmetric information, the model delivers labor market volatilities close to the representative‐agent, full‐information benchmark.     

The Effect of Attending a Small Class in the Early Grades on College-test Taking and Middle School Test Results: Evidence from Project Star

This paper provides a long-term follow-up analysis of students who participated in the Tennessee STAR experiment. In this experiment, students and their teachers were randomly assigned to small, regular-size, or regular-size classes with a teacher aide in the first four years of school. We analyse the effect of past attendance in small classes on student test scores and whether they took the ACT or SAT college entrance exam. Attending a small class in the early grades is associated with an increased likelihood of taking a college-entrance exam, especially among minority students, and somewhat higher test scores.     

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.     

Income and Fiscal Incidence by Age and Gender: Some Evidence from New Zealand

With many fiscal policies likely to have quite different age/gender incidences, this paper examines age and gender dimensions of income distribution and fiscal incidence in New Zealand using Household Economic Survey data for 2010. Applying, and testing, an intra‐household income sharing rule, our evidence suggests strong life‐cycle and gender aspects to fiscal incidence. Net tax liabilities are found to be low and negative, at younger and older ages but positive during much of the “working age.” Notwithstanding considerable within‐gender heterogeneity, women are found on average to have systematically and persistently lower net fiscal liabilities than men, especially at older ages.     

Incentives and teacher effort

Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of how much students learn in school, and how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of lively policy debate in both rich and poor countries. This paper examines how teacher incentives, both pecuniary and non‐pecuniary, correlate with teacher effort. Using school survey data from Lao PDR, we estimate measures of teacher effort, including the number of hours that teachers spend preparing for classes and teacher provision of private tutoring outside of class hours, which are not the typical measures used in previous research. Estimation results fit well under the standard labour supply framework and indicate that greater teacher effort is associated with non‐pecuniary incentives such as more teacher autonomy over teaching materials and monitoring as measured by the existence of an active parent – teacher association and the ability of school principals to dismiss teachers. Methodologically, this paper provides a detailed derivation of a simultaneous OLS‐probit model with school random effects that can jointly estimate teacher work hours and tutoring provision.     

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.     

Analyzing Educational Achievement Differences between Second‐Generation Immigrants: Comparing Germany and German‐Speaking Switzerland

In this study, I provide evidence that the educational achievement of second‐generation immigrants in German‐speaking Switzerland is greater than in Germany. The impact of the first‐generation immigrants' destination decision on their offspring's educational achievement seems to be much more important than has been recognized by the existing literature. I identify the test score gap between these students that cannot be explained by differences in individual and family characteristics. Moreover, I show how this gap evolves over the test score distribution and how the least favorably endowed students fare. My results suggest that the educational system of Switzerland, relative to the German system, enhances the performance of immigrants' children substantially. This disparity is largest when conditioning on the language spoken at home, and prevails even when comparing only students whose parents migrated from the same country of origin.     

CLASS TRACKS AND EDUCATION OUTCOMES: EVIDENCE FROM A CHINESE UNIVERSITY

This article investigates the effect of being assigned to different class tracks on education outcomes in higher education. We use administrative data from a Chinese university where students are assigned to two tracks of English education. Students in the high achieving track enjoy exposure to better peers, but receive less instruction time before taking a national English test. A regression discontinuity design establishes evidence that being assigned to the high achieving track has a negligible effect. Our analysis shows that the null impact is due to the offsetting effects of instruction time and peers. (JEL I21, I23)     

AGE AS A DETERMINANT OF LABOR'S TRADE POLICY INTERESTS

This paper shows that workers with identical innate abilities have heterogeneous trade policy interests, whereby age of the worker and industry of employment are most critical in explaining this heterogeneity. A modified specific factor model, with overlapping generations and a retraining requirement for job switchers, is developed to demonstrate how trade policies affect the economic interests of older workers far more than of younger workers, regardless of whether they gain or lose from the policy. Accordingly, older workers tend to have stronger incentives to become politically active than younger workers.     

Identifying the effects of bullying victimization on schooling

I estimate whether bullying leads to worse academic outcomes for bullied students, exploiting state-year differences in anti-bullying laws, and within-law heterogeneity that provide variation in the probability of bullying victimization. Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, I show that bullying increases the probability of skipping classes and dropping out of high school, and it decreases grade point average by up to 5%. Heterogeneity analysis shows that physical bullying imposes a greater burden on males, though females are relatively more sensitive to nonphysical bullying. These negative effects persist into adulthood as high school bullying decreases college performance and college graduation.     

Stepping up to Teaching in Business: Understanding Teaching Effectiveness for Small Classes

This article provides those teaching in small classes in an Australian tertiary environment with some recommendations on how to get started and tips for effective teaching. The focus of the advice is on small class teaching, which is generally comprised of fewer than 30 students. The tips presented are centred on being organised, understanding your content and your students, generating engagement and norms for participation, as well as investing in adaptable skill development. A seven step process to teaching effectiveness is reviewed. These tips provide teachers with foundational knowledge that can be transferred to teaching large classes.     

Using a Simple Contest to Illustrate Mechanism Design

This article describes a simple classroom activity that illustrates how economic theory can be used for mechanism design. The rules for a set of contests are presented; the results typically obtained from these contests illustrate how the prize structure can be manipulated in order to produce a particular outcome. Specifically, this activity is designed to show how changing the prize structure can impact both the contestants’ average efforts and the effort level of the hardest-working contestant. The activity can be run in a 50-minute class, has instructions that fit on a single piece of paper, and, although it can be run in large classes, requires only six students.     

A COLLABORATIVE LEARNING LAB: DOES THE FORM MATTER?

A recent paper found that adding a collaborative learning lab (CLL) component to a traditional introductory microeconomics class significantly improved students' scores on a standardized final exam. Here, the authors reconsider these results in two fundamental ways. First, this article is able to include student-specific factors, such as standardized test scores and age, to control for a student's desire and ability to perform. These results suggest that they slightly underestimate the gains from CLL classes. The second question addressed concerns the implementation of the CLL component. In the original work, the CLL class contained only 24 students in class (small-CLL). This paper introduces the CLL component into a class with 48 students (largE-CLL). The authors found students attending a large in-class CLL failed to perform significantly better on a standardized test than students attending classes without an in-class CLL. They also performed significantly worse than students in a small-CLL environment. This article suggests that a CLL can improve scores if care is taken to both maintain an environment that maximizes student–instructor interaction and monitors student collaboration.     

高校组阁式班级管理模式的探索与反思

随着90后大学生开始进入大学校门,传统的高校班级管理模式开始受到冲击,本文通过对2009级学前教育两个班级组阁式班级管理模式的实践分析,探讨如何从班级管理角度让90后大学生更好的融入大学生生活,同时对90后高校班级的辅导员工作进行了反思。     

Tracking Can Be More Equitable Than Mixing

Parents and policy‐makers often wonder whether and how the choice of a tracked or mixed educational system affects the equality of opportunity. I answer this question by analyzing the influence of peers on future educational results. I define an equal opportunity policy as one that maximizes the average lifetime income of the worst‐off type of individuals in society (i.e., students from disadvantaged backgrounds). I find that tracking maximizes average lifetime income if the opportunity cost of college attendance is sufficiently high.     

Intra‐Week Price Patterns in the Housing Market*

In this paper, I demonstrate the existence of city‐specific intra‐week price patterns in the Norwegian housing market. I use a data set with exact sell dates to show that sell prices are higher on certain days. Using ask prices and observations on repeat sales in fixed‐effect models, I seek to control for composition effects and unobserved heterogeneity. The intra‐week price patterns are shown to be associated with patterns in the frequency of public‐showing days. I argue that the findings are consistent with optimizing agents acting on new information.     

Some Determinants of Student Attitudes Toward Large Classes

McConnell and Sosin present a study concerned with how students perceive class size in courses in economics and business, and examine a number of factors that contribute to these perceptions. They also suggest how institutions may be able to minimize the undesirable aspects of large classes.     

Cost thresholds,cut-offs and sensitivities in stated choice analysis: Identification and implications

Within the discrete choice literature, there is growing recognition that some respondents do not process all attributes when evaluating their choice outcomes. Worryingly, the cost attribute is often among those attributes that are likely to be ignored by respondents. We use probabilistic decision process models (similar in form to latent class models, but where we define the classes to describe specific heuristics) to facilitate situations where respondents adopt cost thresholds and cut-offs. We further develop this model to address the potential confounding between preference heterogeneity and processing heterogeneity by simultaneously allowing for a segmentation of respondents based on their sensitivities to cost. Results, based on an empirical dataset on the existence value of rare fish species in Ireland, provide further confirmation that a share of respondents did not attended to cost. Importantly, however, when heterogeneity to cost levels is accounted for the inferred incidence of complete non-attendance is markedly lower, to the extent that when cost thresholds and cut-offs are also accommodated it almost disappears. This modelling approach leads to significant gains in model fit and has important implications for welfare analysis.