The effect of financial education training on the financial literacy of Spanish students in PISA

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of financial education training on Spanish secondary students. To do this, we rely on data from PISA 2012. This included an assessment of students’ financial literacy for the first time. In order to identify the causal effect of financial education courses, we employ a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to compare the outcomes of students receiving and not receiving education on financial concepts for two different subjects (financial literacy and reading comprehension). Our results suggest that financial education programs only have an impact if they are taught as part of other subjects, i.e. by means of a cross-curricular approach.     

Best-Worst PROMETHEE method for evaluating school performance in the OECD's PISA project

This paper introduces the Best-Worst PROMETHEE method, which avoids the rank reversal problem of other PROMETHEE methods. We use this new technique to rank schools in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We consider three separate outputs, provided by average student attainments in mathematics, language, and sciences. Our sample comprises 16,500 schools in 66 countries, and our results show significant differences between school performance both within and between countries. The top half of the ranking mainly comprises European and Asian countries, while the bottom half includes many North African, Middle Eastern, and South American countries. We find no strong association between inequality between schools and the country-level performance, suggesting the absence of a trade-off between equity and performance in education. The Best-Worst PROMETHEE is a generic method that can be used to support decisions in strategic sectors with multidimensional outcomes.     

Exploring the relationship between Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and academic performance: A multilevel analysis for Spain

With the world becoming increasingly digitalized, determining the relationship between the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and educational outcomes takes on special relevance for guiding educational policy decisions in a reasoned way. The objective of this research is to explore the relationship between different types of ICT use at school and at home, students' attitudes towards ICT, and academic performance, as well as to see if these associations differ according to the level of performance of the students. For this purpose, we apply multilevel regression models and quantile regression models with data from the Programme for International Student assessment survey (PISA) 2015. The results show differences in the sign of the association according to the ICT variable analysed. The positive association between ICT use and academic performance is related with its use for entertainment at home, the students’ interest in ICT and an earlier starting age for using ICT. Results also show that higher availability of computers per student in the schools is associated with higher levels of academic performance. However, the use of ICT for schoolwork at home, the use of ICT by students in schools and the importance of ICT as a topic in social interaction for students, are factors negatively associated with academic performance. Finally, our quantile regressions by ability levels suggest that certain types of ICT use appear to be particularly associated with the academic performance of students in the lowest percentiles of performance. These results highlight the need to consider and include ICT as an input into the educational production function. Moreover, public policies should consider the interaction between ICT and the educational performance of underperforming students.     

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.     

Educational performance gaps in Eastern Europe

To assess the educational performance gaps in Eastern Europe, this article takes a look at the differences in PISA test scores between Finland and seven Eastern European countries, as well as between Eastern European countries. The methodology applied is a semiparametric version of the threefold Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition. We find that main part of the average test score gap cannot be explained by the individual characteristics. Furthermore, our analysis at different quantiles provides evidence that the average test score gaps are due to the fact that poorly performing students in Finland score much higher than poorly performing students in Eastern Europe.     

The impact of immigrant concentration in schools on grade retention in Spain: a difference-in-differences approach

Since the late 1990s, Spain has played host to a sizeable flow of immigrants who have been absorbed into the compulsory stage of the education system. In this article, our aim is to assess the impact of that exogenous increase in the number of immigrant students from 2003 to 2009 on grade retention using Spanish data from PISA 2003 and 2009. For this purpose, we use the difference-in-differences method as a dose treatment capable of detecting whether the immigrant concentration has had a significant effect on student performance. Our results evidenced that their arrival does not on average decrease school promotion rates with respect to 2003 and is even beneficial to native students. However, although the concentration of immigrant students at the same school does have a negative impact on immigrant students generating more grade retention, native students are unaffected until concentrations of immigrant students is above 15%.     

New evidence on the importance of instruction time for student achievement on international assessments

We re-examine the importance of instruction time for student achievement on international assessments. We successfully replicate the positive effect of weekly instruction time in the seminal paper by Lavy (Economic Journal, 125, F397-F424) in a narrow sense. Extending the analysis to other international assessments, we find effects that are consistently smaller in magnitude. We provide evidence that this discrepancy might be partly due to a different way of measuring instruction time in the data used in the original paper. Our results suggest that differences in instruction time are less important than previously thought for explaining international gaps in student achievement.