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Program and policy effects
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Credit Loss, Institutional Retention, and Postsecondary Persistence Among Vertical Transfer Students
Although community colleges have served as a gateway to universities for millions of students—disproportionately so for students from populations historically underrepresented in higher education—prior research has demonstrated that the majority of vertical transfer students lose at least some of their pretransfer credits. However, researchers examining how credit loss relates to subsequent college outcomes have been hindered by data limitations. For this study, we drew from the literature on academic momentum and examined the relationship between credit loss, institutional retention, and postsecondary persistence. Our use of novel administrative data from Texas enabled us to disentangle major credit loss from general credit loss and study the contribution of each credit loss type to posttransfer outcomes. Our analyses show that both forms of credit loss are inversely related to institutional retention, but the relationships between credit loss and postsecondary persistence are far less consistent. We found evidence suggesting that major credit loss is more strongly related to both retention and persistence than general credit loss. We did not find evidence that the relationship between credit loss and posttransfer outcomes is moderated by students’ race/ethnicity, economic status, or gender, and we found only limited evidence of moderation by major.
What Impacts Should We Expect from Tutoring at Scale? Exploring Meta-Analytic Generalizability
U.S. public schools are engaged in an unprecedented effort to expand tutoring in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Broad-based support for scaling tutoring emerged, in part, because of the large effects on student achievement found in prior meta-analyses. We conduct an expanded meta-analysis of 265 randomized control trials and explore how estimates change when we better align our sample with a policy-relevant target of inference: large-scale tutoring programs in the U.S. aiming to improve standardized test performance. Pooled effect sizes from studies with stronger target-equivalence remain meaningful but are only a third to a half as large as those from our full sample. This result is driven by stark declines in pooled effect sizes as program scale increases. We explore four hypotheses for this pattern and document how a bundled package of recommended design features serves to partially inoculate programs from these attenuated effects at scale.
Toward a Comprehensive Model Predicting Credit Loss in Vertical Transfer
A growing body of research has documented extensive credit loss among transfer students. However, the field lacks theoretically driven and empirically supported frameworks that can guide credit loss research and reforms. We develop and then test a comprehensive framework designed to address this gap using novel administrative credit loss data from Texas. Our results demonstrate how the likelihood of credit loss varies across course characteristics, majors, pretransfer academics, student characteristics, and sending and receiving institutions. Additionally, we are able to disentangle general credit loss from major credit loss and examine how they vary across institutions, majors, and the combination of both. The extensive variation in credit loss among universities in particular underscores the need for future research and reform.
Human Capital at Home: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in the Philippines
Children spend most of their time at home in their early years, yet efforts to promote human capital at home in many low- and middle-income settings remain limited. We conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate an intervention which encourages parents and caregivers to foster human capital accumulation among their children between ages 3 and 5, with a focus on math and phonics skills. Children gain 0.52 and 0.51 standard deviations relative to the control group on math and phonics tests, respectively (p<0.001). A year later effects persist, but math gains dissipate to 0.15 (p=0.06) and phonics to 0.13 (p=0.12). Effects appear to be mediated largely through instructional support by parents and not other parent investment mechanisms, such as more positive parent-child interactions or additional time spent on education at home beyond the intervention. Our results show that parents can be effective conduits of educational instruction even in low-resource settings.
Foreign Student Share and Supply of STEM-Designated Economics Programs
Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the number of U.S. institutions offering STEM-eligible degree programs in economics. This paper documents the trends in STEM-degree offerings across degree levels and examines the share of foreign students and other characteristics of institutions that offer STEM-eligible programs. Using a difference-in-differences design, this paper finds that departments with a proportion of foreign students above the sample median are 6 and 9 percentage points more likely to offer a STEM-eligible degree program at the bachelor's and master's levels, respectively, after the STEM designation in 2013. Additionally, the tobit regression results suggest that early adopters of STEM-eligible programs are associated with a higher share of foreign students, private institutions and doctoral and research institutions.
Do the Effects Persist? An Examination of Long-term Effects After Students Leave Turnaround Schools
Whole-school reforms have received widespread attention, but a critical limitation of the current literature is the lack of evidence around whether these extensive and costly interventions improve students’ long-term outcomes after they leave reform schools. Leveraging Tennessee’s statewide turnaround reforms, we use difference-in-differences models to estimate the effect of attending a turnaround middle school on student outcomes in high school, including test scores, attendance, chronic absenteeism, disciplinary actions, drop out, and high school graduation. We find little evidence to support improved long-run student outcomes – mostly null effects that are nearly zero in magnitude. Our results contribute to a broad call for educational researchers to examine whether school reforms meaningfully affect student outcomes beyond short-term improvements in test scores.
Teaching Teachers to Use Computer Assisted Learning Effectively: Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Evidence
Mastery learning – the process by which students must demonstrate proficiency with a single topic before moving on – is well recognized as one of the best ways to learn, yet many teachers struggle or remain unsure about how to implement it into a classroom setting. This study leverages two field experiments to test the efficacy of a program designed to encourage greater mastery learning through technology and proactive continuous teacher support. Focusing on elementary and middle school mathematics, teachers receive weekly coaching in how to use Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) for students to follow a customized roadmap of incremental progress. Results indicate significant intent-to-treat effects on math performance of 0.12-0.22 standard deviations. Further analysis shows that these gains are concentrated among students in classrooms with at least an average of 35 minutes of practice per week. Teachers able to achieve high-dosage practice have a high degree of initial buy-in, a clear implementation strategy for when practice occurs, and a willingness to closely monitor progress and follow-up with struggling students.
Disability as Discipline? Effects of the New York City Suspension Ban on Identification of Students with Disabilities
Less is More: The Causal Effect of Four-Day School Weeks on Employee Turnover
The use of four-day school weeks (4dsw) in the United States has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. Previous work examines the impact of 4dsw on student outcomes, but little research to date examines the effect on school employees even though schools in some locales have adopted 4dsw to recruit and retain staff. This paper examines the effect of 4dsw adoption in Oregon, a state with widespread 4dsw use, on teacher and other school staff retention by leveraging a staggered roll-out of the schedule using a difference-in-differences design. We find that adopting a four-day week increased turnover among teachers, but that turnover among non-teaching staff was largely unaffected. The findings suggest that policymakers interested in implementing 4dsw for improved school employee retention should exercise caution and be attentive to the full set of incentives offered to staff.