Essays on the Economics of Student Achievement PDF Download

Author: Amy F. (Higginbotham) Godfrey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Hwanoong Lee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781392075777
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 164

View

Book Description
This dissertation comprises three essays on the Economics of Education. Its ultimate focus is to understand how different agents in the education market respond to releasing information about teacher and school performance and how public interventions influence human capital accumulation. The first essay "The Effect of Releasing Teacher Performance Information to Schools: Teachers' Response and Student Achievement" examines the effects of releasing teacher value-added (VA) information on student performance in two settings; in the first, VA data was released to all potential employers within the district, while in the second, only the current employer received the data. I find that student achievement increased only in the district where the VA scores were provided to all potential employers. These effects were driven solely by improved performance among ex-ante less-effective teachers; the null effects in the other setting, however, were driven by moderate declines in performance among ex-ante highly-effective teachers and small improvements among less-effective teachers. These results highlight the importance of understanding how the design features of VA disclosure translate into the productivity of teachers. The second essay "The Role of Credible Threats and School Competition within School Accountability Systems: Evidence from Focus Schools in Michigan" studies the impact of receiving accountability labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of Focus (schools with the largest achievement gaps) labels and find that schools receiving the Focus label improved the performance of low-achieving students relative to their barely non-Focus counterparts, and they did so without hurting high-achieving students. The positive achievement effects for Focus schools were entirely driven by Title 1 Focus schools that faced financial sanctions associated with being labeled the following year. There is no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine heterogeneous effects by looking at the number of alternative nearby schooling options. I find that when schools are exposed to a competitive choice environment, receiving the Focus label increased math test scores across the scoring distribution, while schools located in an uncompetitive choice environment improved the test scores of low achievers only. This evidence may suggest the importance of incorporating credible sanctions and school choice options into the school accountability system to maximize the effectiveness of the system on student achievement. Finally, the third essay "The Effects of School Accountability Systems Under NCLB Waiver: Evidence from Priority Schools in Michigan" investigates the impact of receiving Priority labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of the Priority (schools with the lowest performance) label and find no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine whether assigning the Priority label induced the changes in the composition of students. I define several key measures of student composition and find no evidence that the Priority designation influenced the student composition of schools.

Author: Emily P. Hoffman
Publisher: W. E. Upjohn Institute
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

View

Book Description

Author: Luke Sibieta
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Valentina Amanda Paredes Haz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 122

View

Book Description
An important question that many educators face is how to motivate students to study. Many programs in the US and other countries give cash or award incentives to encourage students to exert more effort. In the following three essays, I explore different alternatives to raise student effort, which in turn should raise student achievement, measured in grades and standardized test scores. In my first essay, I propose that the grading system affects the incentives to exert effort among students. For this purpose, I build a model where students maximize their utility by choosing effort. I investigate how student effort changes when there is a change in the grading system from absolute grading to relative grading. I use data from college students in Chile who faced a change in the grading system to test the implications of my model. My model predicts that, for low levels of uncertainty: (i) total effort is higher with absolute grading; (ii) low ability students exert less effort with absolute grading, and; (iii) high ability students exert more effort with absolute grading. The data confirms that there is a change in the distribution of effort, although I don't find a change in the total level of effort. One results from the model discussed in the first essay is that high ability students exert higher effort under higher standards, but a high standard might have a negative impact on low ability students, who could give up and hence exert zero effort. So in my second essay, I explore whether higher grading standards have an effect on student achievement measured by standardized tests. Grading standards are measured as the school intercept in a regression of standardized test scores on grades. Using data from 8th graders in Chile, I find that higher standards have a positive average effect on standardized test scores. This effect is positive for the percentiles 25, 50 and 75 of the achievement distribution and is larger for the 25th percentile. In my third essay, I explore whether the gender of the teacher has an impact on student achievement and if this impact is different for boys and girls. Again, I use data from 8th graders in Chile. Within-student comparisons based on these data indicate that assignment to a same-gender teacher significantly improves the achievement of girls but doesn't improve the achievement of boys. I find that the effect is larger for subjects that are traditionally considered male dominated, and for girls whose mothers have low levels of education, which is consistent with a role model hypothesis.

Author: Yusuke Jinnai
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bonuses (Employee fringe benefits)
Languages : en
Pages : 117

View

Book Description
"Although numerous reforms for improving public education have been proposed in the United States, the effects of implemented programs remain controversial. Focusing on recent reform policies, my dissertation examines the impact of school choice, educational accountability, and teacher performance-pay programs on student achievement. Chapter One analyzes the effects of introducing charter schools, fast-growing school-choice programs, on students at neighboring traditional public schools. Unlike prior work, which estimates the effects at the school level, this study examines the impact at the grade level by exploiting the fact that charter schools expand their grade ranges over time. I define direct impact as the impact on traditional-school students in overlapping grades and indirect impact as the impact on those in non-overlapping grades. Using student-level panel data from North Carolina, this study shows that the entry of charter schools generates a positive and significant direct impact on student achievement. Moreover, I demonstrate that one-quarter of the positive direct impact is driven by student sorting while three-quarters result from competition. Chapter Two presents evidence from a regression-discontinuity analysis of North Carolina's accountability program, in which teachers are awarded an additional cash bonus for improving their students' achievement. Results show that teachers who failed to reach an expected benchmark for their students' achievement, resulting in no bonuses, performed significantly better in the subsequent year than those who reached this benchmark and thus received a bonus. Moreover, the results demonstrate that such impact disappeared once the state government repealed the pay scheme - another indication that teachers actively respond to monetary bonuses. Chapter Three examines the performance-pay program from a different viewpoint. To date, no studies in this literature have examined the potentially negative effects of repealing incentive bonuses. This chapter exploits North Carolina's policy changes, which first reduced and finally repealed its teacher incentive bonuses. This paper shows that, as a result, student achievement at the lowest-performing schools significantly decreased after the reduction and further decreased after the repeal of the bonus. These findings illustrate that once incentives are introduced it is not cost-free to reduce or remove them"--Pages v-vi.

Author: Hosung Sohn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240

View

Book Description
This dissertation addresses three questions in the economics of education. Chapter 1 analyzes whether segregating students by gender is beneficial for students' academic achievement. Students or parents often choose peer groups by selecting school types, assuming that peers are important determinants of one's academic achievement. Among the various types of peer effects, this study addresses whether segregating students from the opposite sex is beneficial for one's academic performance by making use of the variation created by randomly assigning students to either same- or mixed-sex high schools. By using seven years of administrative data on scores in college entrance exams, I find that both male and female students benefit by being in same-sex schools. Moreover, the quantile regression analysis reveals that the effect is greater for students located at the middle quantile of the distribution of test scores. I conducted a sensitivity analysis by using a different type of test that students take, and the results are robust. In Chapter 2, unlike estimating the effect of conventional incentive mechanisms in which good schools are rewarded and bad schools are punished, I estimate the impact of "rewarding" poor-performing schools on students' academic achievement. Because of the simple discontinuous eligibility that determines the provision of categorical school funding to underachieving schools, I use regression discontinuity designs to causally estimate the treatment effect. The results of the analysis reveal that students' academic performance in poor-performing schools improved significantly (7 to 10 percentile points) after the treatment. Moreover, the ratio of underachieving students decreased in schools that received funding (5 to 10 percentage points), relative to those that did not receive funding. Finally, in Chapter 3, I explore whether grouping students by ability benefits students. Local education agencies often engage in educational reforms with limited resources aimed at improving the academic achievement of students. One of the low cost methods that the agency frequently employs is the use of ability tracking. In this chapter, by making use of the randomized social experiment conducted in Seoul, I provide causal estimates of the effect of ability tracking on students' achievement, using administrative data on students' test scores. Based on the results, I find that, on average, tracking promotes achievement of not only high-achieving students, but also of low-achieving students. Moreover, the magnitude of the treatment effect is similar across various quantiles of the distribution of students' performance. Therefore, contrary to the view that tracking may be detrimental to the learning of low-achieving students, tracking may not worsen inequality in students' achievement.

Author: Peter Sturmthal Bergman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Academic achievement
Languages : en
Pages : 123

View

Book Description
I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I examine how information frictions between parents and their children affect human capital investment, and how much reducing those friction can improve student effort and achievement. I find that providing additional information to parents regarding missing assignments is a potentially cost-effective strategy to increase parental investments and improve student achievement. In Chapter 2, we measure the impact of high-quality charter schools on teen fertility using admission lotteries to several Los Angeles charter schools as a natural experiment. We find evidence that admission to high-quality charter schools can substantially reduce teen pregnancies. In Chapter 3, we semi-parametrically estimate teacher effects on student test scores using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District. We document that there is significantly more within-teacher variation in teachers' effects than across teacher variation. We find that interacting the teacher indicator variables with a function of the students' lagged test scores captures most of the nonlinearities, preserves the heterogeneity of teacher effects, and provides more accurate estimates.

Author: Matthew Scott Farber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 264

View

Book Description
This dissertation examines how current targeted accountability and funding provisions under federal guidelines impact the academic outcomes of the country's more underserved populations.The first chapter demonstrates that accountability at the race level leads to increased reading and math achievement for students. I investigate the impact of school-level accountability on racial subgroups within a school, using a regression-discontinuity design with student-level Texas panel data on third through eighth graders from 2004 through 2011. The targeted incentives increase passing rates by 1-2 percentage points and the scores by .03 standard deviations in both math and reading. These results persist for two to three years after intervention, but fade out by the fourth year. Furthermore, students outside the targeted group are not hindered, with no effect on passing rates and scores. A deeper analysis suggests that schools are not focusing on high-leverage students but rather implementing wide-ranging interventions. I also find that the majority of gains are due to gains among Black students, though it is not clear whether this is due to racial targeting. In the second chapter, I analyze the impact of federally designed and funded interventions on student achievement, both of targeted students and non-targeted students. Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act of 2001, schools with less than 40% low-income students use federal Title I funds for a Targeted Assistance Program, where schools above 40% are free to use those same funds as general school money. This paper uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity design around the 40% threshold with student-level Texas panel data on third through eighth graders from 2004 through 2011 to investigate. The evidence suggests that there is no difference in student outcomes, on the whole or among subsamples, between the methods of using the federal funding. The third chapter of my dissertation shows that the impact of Title I funding on student achievement is complex, benefiting certain subgroups of students while impacting others negatively. I use an instrumental variable research design in order to estimate impacts while keeping external validity through exploiting the large data set available, which includes student-level panel data on Texas public school students from the years 2004 through 2011. Title I funding increases math passing rates by 3 percentage points and has no impact on neither reading passing rates nor standardized scores for either subject. Elementary school students are impacted negatively by Title I funding in both math and reading, while lower-performing and low-income middle school students show large, though insignificant, effects of the funding on both math and reading exams. Unfortunately, this study cannot speak to the impacts on high school students.

Author: John Michael Gilraine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
In principal, public education provides a child's key means of skill accumulation, irrespective of background. In practice, however, the actual performance of public schooling is a disappointment, with stakeholders concerned that the current state of public education heightens inequality and prepares students inadequately for the workforce or higher learning. This thesis develops and applies novel econometric techniques to highlight education policies that may increase student achievement and reduce the pervasive test score gaps that plague public education today. Chapter 1 sets out a new approach that enables me to credibly identify dynamic interactions among school inputs for the first time. Such an approach is rarely adopted in empirical research due to stringent requirements: in an observational setting, identifying dynamic interactions requires period-by-period randomization. I overcome this challenge by combining rich administrative data with a rule whereby students are held accountable only if there are forty or more students in their demographic group. The rule provides useful year-to-year variation, supplying the backbone of my identification strategy. I then estimate the technology structurally and consider the efficacy of alternative accountability schemes: conditioning on initial test scores rather than prior test scores can increase average achievement and reduce inequality. Chapter 2 proposes an approach that allows researchers to identify separate treatment components from a single discontinuity. As an application, I consider the discontinuity associated with class size caps -- a widespread education policy used to reduce class sizes. My approach exploits the asymmetry between school-grades entering versus exiting treatment to distinguish the pure effect of changes in class size from the effect of a newly-hired teacher. Using data from New York City, I find that class size reductions increase student achievement, though these gains are counteracted by the newly-hired teacher. Chapter 3 uses a regression discontinuity design to investigate the merits of decentralized public goods provision in the context of Title I, the largest U.S. federal education funding program. My results indicate that the negligible impact of Title I is caused by its centralized nature: in a decentralized form, Title I generates a substantial improvement in student achievement, particularly for the socioeconomically disadvantaged.