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Multiple outcomes of education
The primary goal of job training programs is to improve employment and earning outcomes of participants. However, effective job training programs may have potential secondary benefits, including in the form of reduced arrests. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a job training program in New Orleans that was implemented using a randomized controlled trial design. We find that among those who had a prior criminal record, those assigned to the treatment group were two-fifths as likely to get arrested as those assigned to the control group at any time point after randomization. We explore several potential mechanisms for why this effect occurs and find suggestive evidence that the training program’s impact on wages, as well as peer effects from other trainees, can partially explain this effect.
Educators must balance the needs of students who start the school year behind grade level with their obligation to teach grade-appropriate content to all students. Educational software could help educators strike this balance by targeting content to students’ differing levels of mastery. Using a regression discontinuity design and detailed software log and administrative data, we compare two versions of an online mathematics program used by students in three education agencies. We find that although students assigned the modified curriculum did progress through content objectives more quickly than students assigned the default curriculum, they did not perform better on pre- and post-objective quizzes embedded in the software, and most never progressed far enough to reach the grade-level content. Furthermore, there was no statistically significant effect of the modified curriculum on formative test scores. These findings suggest policymakers and practitioners should exercise caution when assigning exclusively remedial content to students who start the school year behind grade level, even though this is a common feature of many math educational software programs.
Many teacher education researchers have expressed concerns with the lack of rigorous impact evaluations of teacher preparation practices. I summarize these various concerns as they relate to issues of internal validity, external validity, and measurement. I then assess the prevalence of these issues by reviewing 166 impact evaluations of teacher preparation practices published in peer-reviewed journals between 2002-2019. Although I find that very few studies address issues of internal validity, external validity and measurement, I highlight some innovative approaches and present a checklist of considerations to assist future researchers in designing more rigorous impact evaluations.
We study the short-run effects of a gamified online entrepreneurship training offered to high school students in Rwanda during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a randomized controlled trial, we estimate sizeable effects of the 6-week training on entrepreneurial activity. One month after the training, participants in schools offered the training were much more likely to own a business than participants in control schools. The training induced students to participate more actively in their school's business club, to undertake more business-oriented actions, to improve their business practices, and to interact more with other youth and family members about their business ideas. We hypothesize that the training might have motivated treated students to sustain their business activities during the COVID-19 crisis.
Despite the prevalence of school tracking, evidence on whether it improves student success is mixed. This paper studies how tracking within high school impacts high-achieving students’ short- and longer-term academic outcomes. Our setting is a large and selective Chinese high school, where first-year students are separated into high-achieving and regular classrooms based on their performance on a standardized exam. Classrooms differ in terms of peer ability, teacher quality, class size, as well as level and pace of instruction. Using newly collected administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we show that high-achieving classrooms improve math test scores by 23 percent of a standard deviation, with effects persisting throughout the three years of high school. Effects on performance in Chinese and English language subjects are more muted. Importantly, we find that high-achieving classrooms substantially raise enrollment in elite universities, as they increase scores on the national college entrance exam—the sole determinant of university admission in China.
We study the long-term effects of a psychological intervention on longitudinal academic outcomes and degree completion of college students. All freshmen at a large public university were randomized to an online growth mindset, belonging, or control group. We tracked students’ academic outcomes including GPA, number of credits attempted and earned, major choices, and degree completion. We found no evidence of longitudinal academic treatment effects in the full sample. However, the mindset treatment improved term GPAs for Latinx students and the probability for Pell-eligible and Latinx students to major in selective majors. We also found no evidence of increased rates of on-time graduation, however, the treatment raised the probability to graduate with selective majors in four years, especially for Latinx students.
Four-day school weeks have proliferated across the United States in recent years, reaching over 650 public school districts in 24 states as of 2019, but little is known about their implementation and there is no consensus on their effects on students. This study uses district level panel data from Oklahoma and a difference-in-differences research design to provide estimates of the causal effect of the four-day school week on high school students’ ACT scores, attendance, and disciplinary incidents during school. Results indicate that four-day school weeks decrease per-pupil bullying incidents by approximately 39% and per-pupil fighting incidents by approximately 31%, but have no detectable effect on other incident types, ACT scores, or attendance.
The benefits of student-teacher ethnoracial matching on student outcomes—ranging from academic achievement to postsecondary attainment—are well documented. Yet, we know far less about the role of student-teacher ethnoracial matching in the earliest grades school and on less about effects on non-academic outcomes. The purpose of this study is to advance our understanding of student-teacher ethnoracial matching in early elementary school by exploring two executive function outcomes – working memory and cognitive flexibility. Drawing on data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten Class of 2011, our findings suggest student-teacher ethnoracial matching benefits on working memory skills, though not cognitive flexibility. Observed associations for working memory are of similar size to those for academic achievement outcomes and are largest for Black and Latinx students.
We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students' religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing compulsory religious education significantly reduced religiosity of affected students in adulthood. It also reduced the religious actions of personal prayer, church-going, and church membership. Beyond religious attitudes, the reform led to more equalized gender roles, fewer marriages and children, and higher labor-market participation and earnings. The reform did not affect ethical and political values or non-religious school outcomes.
This paper compares and contrasts two required building level school violence measures under NCLB, arrests and incidents of well-defined school misconduct acts, across 20 years of Pennsylvania’s approximately 3,000 public school buildings. Generally, both arrests for school violence and incidents of school violence are rare events. Over 20 years, the third quartile arrest rate was zero and, the third quartile incident rate was 3.3%. Relatively few, 4.1% overall, of Pennsylvania’s school buildings were persistently dangerous as defined and reported pursuant to Pennsylvania’s state plan to the US Department of Education; however, these buildings represented about 7.8% of the student population statewide. When we measure whether or not a school building is dangerous based on reported school violence incidents, that is without an arrest requirement, fully 36.9% of Pennsylvania’school buildings were dangerous, and they represented 46.7% of the students statewide. Both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh public school buildings were disproportionately unsafe and among the top 20 districts in the state which were unsafe over the 20 year study period.
Exploratory regression analysis of mean building scale scores for math and language arts explained about 58% of the variation in such learning outcome measures. As expected, household poverty, holding all else constant, has very strong, negative effects on learning outcomes. A school building composed entirely of low income students will score about 240 scale points lower, about 1.24 standard deviations lower, than a school building without any low income students. A school building at the 90th percentile in terms of student misconduct and poverty rates, would have lower student test scores by about 1 to 1.28 standard deviations. Were a school administrator to reduce student misconduct rates from the 90th percentile to the 50th percentile, our regression coefficients predict learning gains on the order of (100-43) = 2/3 of a standard deviation in mean scale scores.