CIRP Freshman Survey (TFS)
Category: Pathways to and Through Postsecondary
An administrative rule allowed students who failed an exam to retake it shortly after, triggering strong `teach to the test' incentives to raise these students' test scores for the retake. We develop a model that accounts for truncation and find that these students score 0.14 standard deviations higher on the retest. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate thirty percent of these gains persist to the following year. These results provide evidence that test-focused instruction or `cramming' raises contemporaneous performance, but a large portion of these gains fade-out. Our findings highlight that persistence should be accounted for when comparing educational interventions.
Keywords
Fade-out; Teaching to the Test; Education Production; Regression Discontinuity
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/94pe-5j18
