Academic qualifications
The Impact of School SES on Student Achievement: Evidence From U.S. Statewide Achievement Data
David Armor, Gary Marks & Aron Malatinszky
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
After the U.S. Supreme Court restricted the use of race in assigning students to schools, there was a surge in advocacy of school integration based on student socioeconomic status (SES). Benefits of socioeconomic integration have been supported by various studies finding significant effects of school SES on achievement after controlling for individual student SES. This article investigates school SES effects using statewide longitudinal achievement data from several U.S. states. School SES effects nearly vanish after controlling for a student’s prior achievement or, alternatively, controlling for stable differences among students using fixed effects models. The article concludes that large school SES effects often found in cross-sectional studies are artifacts of aggregation and are not a sound basis for SES-based school integration policies.
The Impacts of Performance Pay on Teacher Effectiveness and Retention: Does Teacher Gender Matter?
Andrew Hill & Daniel Jones
Journal of Human Resources, forthcoming
Abstract:
Teacher performance pay is increasingly common in the United States. We assess the “incentive effects” of performance pay – the change in behavior of teachers present before and after a reform – with a focus on whether male and female teachers respond differently. Evaluating three performance pay programs in North Carolina, we find clear evidence of a gender difference: while male teachers’ value-added remains flat before and after the introduction of performance pay, the value-added of female teachers declines. We also document suggestive evidence of a gender difference in retention, with men more likely to remain in schools with performance pay.
Attribution Bias in Major Decisions: Evidence from the United States Military Academy
Kareem Haggag et al.
University of Chicago Working Paper, May 2018
Abstract:
Using administrative data, we study the role of attribution bias in a high-stakes, consequential decision: the choice of a college major. Specifically, we examine the influence of fatigue experienced during exposure to a general education course on whether students choose the major corresponding to that course. To do so, we exploit the conditional random assignment of student course schedules at the United States Military Academy. We find that students who are assigned to an early morning (7:30 AM) section of a general education course are roughly 10% less likely to major in that subject, relative to students assigned to a later time slot for the course. We find similar effects for fatigue generated by having one or more back-to-back courses immediately prior to a general education course that starts later in the day. Finally, we demonstrate that the pattern of results is consistent with attribution bias and difficult to reconcile with competing explanations.
The Demotivating Effect (and Unintended Message) of Retrospective Awards
Carly Robinson et al.
Harvard Working Paper, July 2018
Abstract:
It is common for organizations to offer awards to motivate individual behavior, yet few empirical studies evaluate their effectiveness in the field. We report a randomized field experiment (N = 15,329) that tests the impact of two types of symbolic awards on student attendance: preannounced awards (prospective) and surprise awards (retrospective). Contrary to our preregistered hypotheses, prospective awards had no impact while the retrospective awards decreased subsequent attendance. Survey studies provide evidence suggesting that receiving retrospective awards may demotivate the behavior being awarded by inadvertently signaling (a) that recipients have performed the behavior more than their peers have; and (b) that recipients have performed the behavior to a greater degree than was organizationally expected. A school leaders survey shows that awards for attendance are common, and that the organizational leaders who offer these awards are unaware of their potential demotivating impact.
Financially Overextended: College Attendance as a Contributor to Foreclosures During the Great Recession
Jacob Faber & Peter Rich
Demography, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although subprime mortgage lending and unemployment were largely responsible for the wave of foreclosures during the Great Recession, additional sources of financial risk may have exacerbated the crisis. We hypothesize that many parents sending children to college were financially overextended and vulnerable to foreclosure as the economy contracted. With commuting zone panel data from 2006 to 2011, we show that increasing rates of college attendance across the income distribution in one year predict a foreclosure rate increase in subsequent years, net of fixed characteristics and changes in employment, refinance debt, house prices, and 19-year-old population size. We find similar evidence of college-related foreclosure risk using longitudinal household data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our findings uncover a previously overlooked dimension of the foreclosure crisis, and highlight mortgage insecurity as an inadvertent consequence of parental investment in higher education.
School starting age and long‐run health in the United States
Grace Arnold & Briggs Depew
Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
School starting age has been shown to have long‐run effects that persist throughout adolescence and into adulthood. Using variation from state‐level school starting age laws in the United States, we find that males who are older when they enter school are more likely to have higher levels of self‐reported health later in life. We are largely able to rule out education and labor market outcomes as significant channels for this finding. Building from the previous studies that have found conflicting evidence on the effect of school starting age on educational attainment and labor market outcomes in the United States, we find that school starting age decreases the likelihood of high school completion among males but has no significant effect for females. We do not find that labor market outcomes are affected by school starting age.
Fit for the Job: Candidate Qualifications and Vote Choice in Low Information Elections
Lonna Rae Atkeson & Brian Hamel
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cues and heuristics — like party, gender, and race/ethnicity — help voters choose among a set of candidates. We consider candidate professional experience — signaled through occupation — as a cue that voters can use to evaluate candidates’ functional competence for office. We outline and test one condition under which citizens are most likely to use such cues: when there is a clear connection between candidate qualifications and the particular elected office. We further argue that voters in these contexts are likely to make subtle distinctions between candidates, and to vote accordingly. We test our account in the context of local school board elections, and show — through both observational analyses of California election results and a conjoint experiment — that (1) voters favor candidates who work in education; (2) that voters discriminate even among candidates associated with education by only favoring those with strong ties to students; and (3) that the effects are not muted by partisanship. Voters appear to value functional competence for office in and of itself, and use cues in the form of candidate occupation to assess who is and who is not fit for the job.
Does Broad-Based Merit Aid Improve College Completion? Evidence from New Mexico's Lottery Scholarship
Christopher Patrick Erwin & Melissa Binder
Education Finance and Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use the natural experiment of a state lottery scholarship to measure the effect of generous financial aid on graduation rates at New Mexico's flagship public university. During the study period, the scholarship program paid full tuition for eight semesters for any state resident earning a 2.5 GPA in their first semester at any public 2-year or 4-year college. We find a significant positive completion effect of 10 percentage points (17.9 percent) for academically well-prepared students that is offset by a large negative effect of 11.6 percentage points (38.8 percent) for less prepared students. We posit that the scholarship program, which effectively erased the difference in tuition at 2- and 4-year colleges, may have induced weaker students to take their chances on a more prestigious, yet riskier, academic path.
Creativity at the Knowledge Frontier: The Impact of Specialization in Fast- and Slow-paced Domains
Florenta Teodoridis, Michaël Bikard & Keyvan Vakili
Administrative Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse on the performance of theoretical mathematicians as a natural experiment, we attempt to resolve the controversy in prior research on whether specialists or generalists have superior creative performance. While many have highlighted generalists’ advantage due to access to a wider set of knowledge components, others have underlined the benefits that specialists can derive from their deep expertise. We argue that this disagreement might be partly driven by the fact that the pace of change in a knowledge domain shapes the relative return from being a specialist or a generalist. We show that generalist scientists performed best when the pace of change was slower and their ability to draw from diverse knowledge domains was an advantage in the field, but specialists gained advantage when the pace of change increased and their deeper expertise allowed them to use new knowledge created at the knowledge frontier. We discuss and test the roles of cognitive mechanisms and of competition for scarce resources. Specifically, we show that specialists became more desirable collaborators when the pace of change was faster, but when the pace of change was slower, generalists were more sought after as collaborators. Overall, our results highlight trade-offs associated with specialization for creative performance.
Questionable research practices in ecology and evolution
Hannah Fraser et al.
PLoS ONE, July 2018
Abstract:
We surveyed 807 researchers (494 ecologists and 313 evolutionary biologists) about their use of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), including cherry picking statistically significant results, p hacking, and hypothesising after the results are known (HARKing). We also asked them to estimate the proportion of their colleagues that use each of these QRPs. Several of the QRPs were prevalent within the ecology and evolution research community. Across the two groups, we found 64% of surveyed researchers reported they had at least once failed to report results because they were not statistically significant (cherry picking); 42% had collected more data after inspecting whether results were statistically significant (a form of p hacking) and 51% had reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesised from the start (HARKing). Such practices have been directly implicated in the low rates of reproducible results uncovered by recent large scale replication studies in psychology and other disciplines. The rates of QRPs found in this study are comparable with the rates seen in psychology, indicating that the reproducibility problems discovered in psychology are also likely to be present in ecology and evolution.
Way station or launching pad? Unpacking the returns to adult technical education
Celeste Carruthers & Thomas Sanford
Journal of Public Economics, September 2018, Pages 146-159
Abstract:
We estimate returns to diplomas and certificates awarded to adult students by public technology centers, a niche sector of higher education that elevates occupational and competency-based education over transferable credits and traditional degrees. Technology centers cater to nontraditional students, particularly adults seeking part-time training in specific skills. Sub-associate credentials arising from Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology increase access to new industries, particularly health, and industrial mobility explains half of the employment returns to postsecondary diplomas and at least three-quarters of the earnings returns to certificates. TCAT diploma completers earn $707–1034 in additional quarterly earnings over non-completers, similar to the returns from community college diplomas. Benefits extend beyond the signal value of completion: students who leave without a credential fare significantly better than matched non-students with a similar history of earnings.
Effect of Preschool Home Visiting on School Readiness and Need for Services in Elementary School: A Randomized Clinical Trial
Karen Bierman et al.
JAMA Pediatrics, August 2018
Design, Setting, and Participants: In a randomized clinical trial, individual families with preschool children were assigned to receive the Research-Based and Developmentally Informed–Parent home visiting program (REDI-P) (intervention group) or math home learning games in the mail (control group). Follow-up assessments occurred in third grade. Families were recruited from 24 Head Start centers in 3 Pennsylvania counties serving rural and urban areas. Four-year-old children from 200 low-income families participated. Families were recruited in fall 2008 and fall 2009. The follow-up data used were collected in spring 2013 and spring 2014. The analyses were conducted in 2016 to 2017.
Interventions: REDI-P visits followed a well-specified curriculum, with 10 home visits during preschool and 6 booster visits in kindergarten. Parents received coaching to enhance parent-child relationships and home learning materials to support child development and school readiness.
Results: Two hundred participating children (110 [55.0%] white, 52 [26.0%] black, and 38 [19.0%] Latino; 112 [56.0%] male) had a mean (SD) age of 4.45 (0.29) years at the start of intervention. Third-grade outcomes were available for 153 (76.5%) of the initial sample and revealed statistically significant effects on multiple measures in each competency domain. In addition, REDI-P reduced child need for educational and mental health services at school. Significant effect sizes were small to moderate, averaging approximately one-third of 1 SD (Cohen d = 0.27 to 0.45). Mediation models demonstrated that intervention effects on services were accounted for by intervention effects on the targeted competencies.
Making the Most of School Vacation: A Field Experiment of Small Group Math Instruction
Beth Schueler
Education Finance and Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Catching students up who have fallen behind academically is a key challenge for educators, and can be difficult to do in a cost effective manner. This field experiment examines the causal effect of a program designed to provide struggling 6th and 7th graders with math instruction delivered in small groups of roughly ten students by select teachers over weeklong vacation breaks. The program was implemented in a set of low-performing Massachusetts middle schools undergoing turnaround reforms. Attendance at these “Vacation Academies” increased the probability students scored proficient or higher on Common Core-aligned math exams by 10 percentage points and reduced students' exposure to exclusionary discipline by decreasing out-of-school suspensions post-Academy. I find suggestive evidence of positive spillover effects on English Language Arts achievement and end-of-course grades in math and reading. Participants assigned to a single primary teacher for the entire week saw larger reductions in out-of-school suspensions than did students who rotated through teachers specializing in particular lessons. However, teacher specialization was associated with greater test score gains, suggesting a trade-off in outcomes depending on program design. Overall, the program's low cost and lack of a highly competitive teacher selection process make it a scalable approach to individualizing instruction.
Can behavioral tools improve online student outcomes? Experimental evidence from a massive open online course
Richard Patterson
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, September 2018, Pages 293-321
Abstract:
In order to address poor outcomes for online students, I leverage insights from behavioral economics to design three software tools including (1) a commitment device, (2) an alert tool, and (3) a distraction blocking tool. I test the impact of these tools in a massive open online course (MOOC). Relative to students in the control group, students in the commitment device treatment spend 24% more time working on the course, receive course grades that are 0.29 standard deviations higher, and are 40% more likely to complete the course. In contrast, outcomes for students in the alert and distraction blocking treatments are statistically indistinguishable from the control.