Essays On The Determinants Of Student Choices And Educational Outcomes
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Essays On The Determinants Of Student Choices And Educational Outcomes
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Author : Justin A. Wong
language : en
Publisher: Stanford University
Release Date : 2011
Essays On The Determinants Of Student Choices And Educational Outcomes written by Justin A. Wong and has been published by Stanford University this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011 with categories.
This dissertation is composed of three essays. Essay 1, "Does School Start Too Early For Student Learning?", considers the connection between school start time and student performance. Biological evidence indicates that adolescents' internal clocks are designed to make them fall asleep and wake up at later times than adults. This science has prompted widespread debate about delaying school start times in the U.S., a country which has some of the earliest start times worldwide. The debate suffers, however, from a glaring absence of evidence: the small number of prior studies has been too low powered statistically to test whether later start times improve achievement. I fill the gap by studying achievement across a large, nationally representative set of high schools that have varying start times. I identify the positive effect of later clock start times, as well as the independent effect of greater daylight at school start time. My primary empirical method is cross-sectional regression with rich controls for potentially confounding variables. The findings are confirmed by regression discontinuity analysis focused on schools close to time zone boundaries. I quantify the net gain in welfare from having an additional hour of sunlight before school starts by comparing the substantial lifetime earnings benefits for students against the likely the societal costs. Essay 2, "Student Success and Teaching Assistant Effectiveness In Large Classes", considers the impact teaching assistants (TAs) have on student performance. In universities, TAs play a crucial role by providing small group instruction in lecture courses with large enrollment. The multiplicity of TAs creates both positive opportunities and negative incentives. On the one hand, some TAs may excel at tasks--such as helping struggling students--at which other TAs fail. If so, all students may be able to learn better if they can match themselves to the TA that best suits their needs. On the other hand, the multiplicity of TAs means that students in the same class often receive instruction that varies in quality even though they are ultimately graded on the same standard. In this paper, we use data from a large lecture course in which students are conditionally randomly assigned to TAs. In addition to administrative data on scores and grades, we use survey data (which we generated) on students' initial preparation, their study habits, and their interactions with TAs. We identify the existence of variation among TAs in teaching effectiveness. We also identify how TAs vary in their effectiveness with certain subpopulations of students: the least and best prepared, students with different backgrounds, and so on. Using our parameter estimates, we simulate student achievement under scenarios such as random assignment to TAs, elimination/retraining of the least effective TAs, and matching of TAs to students based on initial information to show the potential gains in student welfare from more efficient matching. Essay 3, "A Study of Student Majors: A Historical Perspective", considers whether differing financial returns across degrees are a significant factor in a student's choice of a major. During the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced a technology boom that significantly increased the initial salary offers to engineering students, and computer science students in particular. These dramatic increases in returns provide an excellent opportunity to examine not only how students respond to salary levels, but also to salary trends. The existing literature has focused on the extent to which differing financial returns can affect a student's choice of undergraduate major. This paper extends the analysis to test if trends in salary levels also affect the share of students selecting into various majors using a comprehensive dataset of all post-secondary institutions. I find that students select into majors that offer higher salaries and have greater wage growth. Using a flexible empirical model that allows students to respond to both changes in salary levels and growth, I find that the results hold across majors and within engineering disciplines. These results help to explain why, for instance, the percentage of students choosing to major in computer science grew more rapidly than could be explained by salary level alone.
Essays On The Determinants Of Student Choices And Educational Outcomes
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Author : Justin A. Wong
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2011
Essays On The Determinants Of Student Choices And Educational Outcomes written by Justin A. Wong and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011 with categories.
This dissertation is composed of three essays. Essay 1, "Does School Start Too Early For Student Learning?", considers the connection between school start time and student performance. Biological evidence indicates that adolescents' internal clocks are designed to make them fall asleep and wake up at later times than adults. This science has prompted widespread debate about delaying school start times in the U.S., a country which has some of the earliest start times worldwide. The debate suffers, however, from a glaring absence of evidence: the small number of prior studies has been too low powered statistically to test whether later start times improve achievement. I fill the gap by studying achievement across a large, nationally representative set of high schools that have varying start times. I identify the positive effect of later clock start times, as well as the independent effect of greater daylight at school start time. My primary empirical method is cross-sectional regression with rich controls for potentially confounding variables. The findings are confirmed by regression discontinuity analysis focused on schools close to time zone boundaries. I quantify the net gain in welfare from having an additional hour of sunlight before school starts by comparing the substantial lifetime earnings benefits for students against the likely the societal costs. Essay 2, "Student Success and Teaching Assistant Effectiveness In Large Classes", considers the impact teaching assistants (TAs) have on student performance. In universities, TAs play a crucial role by providing small group instruction in lecture courses with large enrollment. The multiplicity of TAs creates both positive opportunities and negative incentives. On the one hand, some TAs may excel at tasks--such as helping struggling students--at which other TAs fail. If so, all students may be able to learn better if they can match themselves to the TA that best suits their needs. On the other hand, the multiplicity of TAs means that students in the same class often receive instruction that varies in quality even though they are ultimately graded on the same standard. In this paper, we use data from a large lecture course in which students are conditionally randomly assigned to TAs. In addition to administrative data on scores and grades, we use survey data (which we generated) on students' initial preparation, their study habits, and their interactions with TAs. We identify the existence of variation among TAs in teaching effectiveness. We also identify how TAs vary in their effectiveness with certain subpopulations of students: the least and best prepared, students with different backgrounds, and so on. Using our parameter estimates, we simulate student achievement under scenarios such as random assignment to TAs, elimination/retraining of the least effective TAs, and matching of TAs to students based on initial information to show the potential gains in student welfare from more efficient matching. Essay 3, "A Study of Student Majors: A Historical Perspective", considers whether differing financial returns across degrees are a significant factor in a student's choice of a major. During the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced a technology boom that significantly increased the initial salary offers to engineering students, and computer science students in particular. These dramatic increases in returns provide an excellent opportunity to examine not only how students respond to salary levels, but also to salary trends. The existing literature has focused on the extent to which differing financial returns can affect a student's choice of undergraduate major. This paper extends the analysis to test if trends in salary levels also affect the share of students selecting into various majors using a comprehensive dataset of all post-secondary institutions. I find that students select into majors that offer higher salaries and have greater wage growth. Using a flexible empirical model that allows students to respond to both changes in salary levels and growth, I find that the results hold across majors and within engineering disciplines. These results help to explain why, for instance, the percentage of students choosing to major in computer science grew more rapidly than could be explained by salary level alone.
Essays On The Determinants Of School Quality And Student Achievement
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Author : Vasudha Rangaprasad
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2004
Essays On The Determinants Of School Quality And Student Achievement written by Vasudha Rangaprasad and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2004 with Academic achievement categories.
My dissertation examines the determinants of school quality and its impact on student achievement. The first essay studies the impact of class size on student achievement. The impact of class size on student achievement remains an open question despite hundreds of empirical studies and the perception amongst parents, teachers, and policymakers that larger classes are a significant detriment to student development. This essay attempts to shed new light on this ambiguity by explicitly recognizing the distributed nature of educational outcomes. This paper utilizes recently developed nonparametric tests for stochastic dominance to uniformly rank entire distributions of test scores. Moreover, by using bootstrap techniques, we are able to report the results of the dominance tests to a degree of statistical certainty. This type of analysis is very useful for policy decisions as it lends itself to broad-based, consensus ranking of outcomes. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, we estimate the effects of eighth and tenth grade class size on the unconditional and conditional distributions of contemporaneous test scores, subsequent test scores, and test score gains. The results are quite surprising. First, after controlling for a host of determinants of student achievement, we find compelling evidence suggesting that students benefit from relatively large classes. Second, we document several instances where the relationship between student achievement and class size is non-monotonic. Finally, these conclusions are unaltered when we allow for heterogeneous effects of class size by student race or subject matter. In my second essay, I address questions regarding school competition using a spatial autoregressive model. Education reforms involving expanded school choice are receiving increased attention. Many view the heightened competition that would presumably result from such reforms as a panacea for the ills currently plaguing the US public education system. However, the present system is not devoid of competition even absent such reforms; public schools compete for students through the Tiebout (1956) process. Thus, this essay seeks to answer two questions: (i) Does competition alter the behavior of public school districts? and (ii) Do public school districts compete with neighboring public school districts? To answer such questions, we utilize panel data from Illinois over the period 1990-2000 and estimate a multi-dimensional mixed regressive, spatial autoregressive model via instrumental variables, thereby eliminating the possibility of confounding strategic competition with spatial error correlation. The data come from two sources: the Common Core of Data and the Census of Population and Housing. We find robust evidence that public school districts incorporate the educational input decisions of other public school districts in the same county into their decision calculus, thereby acting strategically when setting own input levels. Thus, reforms leading to expansion of school choice would not introduce competition into the US school system, but rather would at best accentuate the level of competition. The third essay examines the impact of peer group effects on student achievement. The current empirical evidence on the magnitude of these effects is, however, inconclusive. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, I assess the impact of peer group influences on the test scores of tenth grade students using school-by-subject specific fixed effects models, as well as a Generalized Methods of Moments approach (via instrumental variables) to account for potential endogeneity of the peer group formation. The results are striking. In particular, I fail to uncover widespread evidence in favor of positive peer group effects. The OLS estimations yield strong and positive effects of peer group achievement on test score gains. When I account for potential endogeneity of peer group formation via instrumental variables and fixed effects these effects disappear. In addition, the dispersion of peer group achievement has no systematic influence on achievement growth. Moreover, I find no evidence supporting the hypothesis that peer effects have differential impacts in schools in which tracking is present. The only exception to the above findings is in models that control for both peer effects and tracking, and allow the effect of each to differ according to student ability. In this case, while the impact of tracking is not found to be substantially different in tracked versus nontracked schools, the results are consistent with a nonuniform effect of tracking on achievement across students of different abilities. Finally, these fundamental conclusions are not substantially altered when I allow for changes in the definitions of peer group effect and tracking.
The Changing Face Of Higher Education
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Author : Dennis A. Ahlburg
language : en
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Release Date : 2018-07-04
The Changing Face Of Higher Education written by Dennis A. Ahlburg and has been published by Taylor & Francis this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018-07-04 with Education categories.
Over the last decade, a heated debate has raged in the US and the UK over whether the humanities are in crisis, and, if there is one, what form this crisis takes and what the response should be. Questioning how there can be such disagreement over a fundamental point, The Changing Face of Higher Education explores this debate, asking whether the humanities are in crisis after all by objectively evaluating the evidence at hand, and opening the debate up to a global scale by applying the questions to twelve countries from different continents. Each carefully chosen contributor considers the debate from the perspective of a different country. The chapters present data on funding, student enrolment in the humanities, whether the share of total enrolment in this area is falling, and answer the following questions: What does each country mean by the ‘humanities’? Is there a ‘crisis’ in the humanities in this country? What are the causes for the crisis? What are the implications for the humanities disciplines? Uniquely offering an objective evaluation of whether this crisis exists, the book will appeal to international humanities and higher education communities and policy-makers, including postgraduate students and academics.
Essays On Educational Choices
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Author : Sie Won Kim
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2018
Essays On Educational Choices written by Sie Won Kim and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with Electronic dissertations categories.
Chapter 1 evaluates two policy counterfactuals designed to promote access to community colleges: tuition subsidies for community college students and easier transition from two- to four-year colleges. I estimate a structural model of employment and college choices, including two-year colleges that provide post-secondary education at a lower cost and an opportunity to transfer to four-year colleges. First, I find that full tuition subsidies at two-year colleges increase the number of students initially enrolled in two-year colleges by 72.1 percent, and mostly attract students who would have not attended college otherwise. This increase in two-year college enrollment translates into an increase of $20,812 in the present value of lifetime income, which is larger than the average cost of $12,550. However, this does not translate into an increase in the number of transfers and four-year college degrees completed. Second, when two-year colleges provide better preparation for students for their transition to four-year institutions, I find that the number of students initially enrolled in two-year colleges increases by 19 percent, the transfer rate increases by 27.5 percent, and the completion rate at four-year colleges increases by 3.1 percent. The average present discounted value of lifetime income also increases by $16,589. Chapter 2 investigates the effect of the quality of public schools on students' enrollment decisions and their academic achievements in college. I use the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to create a measure of the quality of high schools by taking the average of the standardized test scores of students in each school. I estimate a model of college enrollment and continuation choices in which the quality of high schools could affect students' educational outcomes. I find that the quality of high schools has a positive effect on the probability of receiving a high SAT score and the probability of being admitted to high-quality colleges. The counterfactual results show that centralizing public education results in a higher college enrollment rate of students from low-quality school districts. When a policy imposes a lower bound for high school quality, I find that college enrollment increases by 9.1 percent and college completion increases by 7.8 percent for students attending the lowest quality quartile schools. Lastly, a 10 percent increase in the ability of students from the lowest 25th percentile quality schools increases enrollment and completion by 59.5 percent and 33.3 percent, respectively. The counterfactual results suggest that improvement in the quality of public schools has a modest effect on college enrollment and completion compared to a direct increase in the ability of the students.
Essays On The Determinants Of Educational Attainment
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Author : Francisco Eugenio Martorell
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2005
Essays On The Determinants Of Educational Attainment written by Francisco Eugenio Martorell and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2005 with categories.
Essays On The Determinants Of Student Achievement In France And The Us
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Author : Simon Briole
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019
Essays On The Determinants Of Student Achievement In France And The Us written by Simon Briole and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with categories.
The Human Capital Theory developed by Gary Becker in the 60's substantially widened the area of investigation of economics. Over the last two decades, many studies in the economics of education intended to identify the characteristics of an educational system which enable individuals to acquire as much skills, knowledge and information as possible. This thesis contribute to this literature by studying two aspects of the educational environment that has particularly attracted economists' attention over recent years: teacher productivity and peer effects in the classroom. The first chapter of this thesis investigate to what extent teaching practices implemented by math teachers in the US relate to their students' math performance. First, it shows that every single hour spent in the classroom studying mathematics generate a significant improvement in students' math performance. Second, it shows that the productivity of instructional time strongly relates to the implementation of interactive teaching practices, which require student active participation in the lesson. More precisely, each hour spent with a teacher putting a high weight on this kind of practices is 2 to 3 times more productive than an hour spent with a teacher putting a higher weight on traditional practices, such a teacher lecture. The second chapter of this thesis studies the impact of a public policy aimed at improving teachers' practices, namely the individual teacher evaluation system in French secondary education. In this chapter, we show that students' performance at the end-of-middle school national exam significantly improve after the evaluation of their math teacher, not only for students taught by an evaluated teacher the year of the evaluation, but also for students taught by the same teacher on subsequent years, suggesting a long-lasting improvement in teacher pedagogical skills. These positive effects persist over time for students, who not only perform better at the end-of-middle school exam but also choose more often and graduate more often from the science track in high school. In addition, the positive effects of teacher evaluation are particularly salient in education priority schools, in contexts where teaching is often very challenging.The third chapter of this thesis investigates the effect of school peers' gender on students' performance and educational careers in French middle schools. First, it shows that the proportion of female peers' in middle school has persistent effects on students' educational careers as it not only affects students' test score at the end-of-9th-grade national examination, but also influences their track choices and high school graduation rates several years later. Second, it shows that a larger share of girls in the classroom has positive effects for girls and negative effects for boys. More specifically, it reduces girls' dropout rates and increases their probability to graduate from an academic track in high school, especially in the scientific track, while it increases boys' probability to attend a vocational school after 9th grade and decreases their high school graduation rate.
Three Essays On Social Determinants Of Students Skills
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Author : Juan Diego Luksic Ziliani
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2021
Three Essays On Social Determinants Of Students Skills written by Juan Diego Luksic Ziliani and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2021 with categories.
This thesis comprises three essays on how social context moderates the impact of different shocks on kids' skills. In the first essay, I study the impact of one of the largest earthquakes and tsunami on students' primary and secondary school skills. After this event, the government reacted effectively to recover economic activity but overlooked the interventions to treat the trauma-related effects on children and their families. Using rich admin data, I find that the earthquake and the tsunami accounted for fewer days of formal education - because of damages in school infrastructure- and an increase of post-traumatic stress disorder prevalence among adults. Surprisingly, there is no impact on educational outcomes in primary school due to the earthquake or the tsunami. Children exposed in primary school do, however, show a negative effect on skills when they are in secondary school, and this effect is stronger for children exposed early in primary school. These results show that these events have a larger impact on children when exposed younger and that these negative effects surge during adolescence. This evidence is consistent with the prominent surge of mental health pathologies during adolescence. In the second essay, I study how migration-induced neighborhood changes can affect native test scores. Migration waves can change the composition of neighborhoods through immigrant arrivals and native relocations. There is literature analyzing immigrant effects on native students by studying peer effects in schools. By identifying the variation in the composition of classroom peers, such approaches can capture the impacts of the neighborhood composition only in part. In this paper, I compare the results of two different methods to analyze the impact of immigration on children's test scores and show broader changes in neighborhood effects indeed can be important. My paper exploits the recent migratory phenomenon in Chile, where from 2012 to 2019 immigrant population increased from near 1 % to 8 %. I estimate the neighborhood influence on native test scores following Chetty and Hendren's (2018) methodology. On average, I find a negative impact of foreign students on municipality effects. Then, I estimate the immigrant peer effect on native test scores. I find a precise null effect using two methods: a comparison across school cohorts and classes. These results show that immigration did not affect natives directly but rather through changes in the neighborhood. Exploring native composition changes, I find that immigration induces native flight and increases socio-economic segregation across schools. These results are consistent with migration changing neighborhoods by influencing a change in the composition of natives. The third essay, joint with Nicolas Navarrete and Claudio Allende, studies how students respond when off-platform universities participate in the centralized admission system in Chile. In 2011, eight new universities (G8) were incorporated into the platform used already by 25 universities (G25). In a difference-in-difference setting, we exploit G8 location and compare students who graduated from high school in a G8 city with those in non-G8 cities. Using administrative data on university, platform application and high school enrolment, we find that the inclusion of G8 universities increases student sorting. Women and students from lower backgrounds benefit the most, implying gains in equity and efficiency. These gains, however, do not remain in long-term outcomes such as graduation and enrolment after five years. Moreover, preferences for G25 universities decrease after the second year of the reform. We hypothesize that platform releasing cutoffs one year after the reform induces the change in listing preference, but heterogeneity results do not support this mechanism.
Cambridge Academic English B2 Upper Intermediate Student S Book
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Author : Martin Hewings
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2012-02-09
Cambridge Academic English B2 Upper Intermediate Student S Book written by Martin Hewings and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-02-09 with Foreign Language Study categories.
Gives students further practice in academic study skills. Students analyse characteristics of written and spoken academic texts, develop awareness of academic culture and learn to avoid plagiarism. From essay organisation, taking notes, group discussion to writing references and paraphrasing texts.
Three Essays In The Economics Of Education
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Author : Linda Wang
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2020
Three Essays In The Economics Of Education written by Linda Wang and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020 with categories.
This thesis is made up of three chapters that examine student choices in Canada's higher education system: student choice of major (Chapter 1), of courses (Chapter 2), and to continue in college/university (rather than drop out) (Chapter 3). Chapter 1 studies the gender enrolment gap in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs in university. Conducting a survey at a leading Canadian university, I find that female students are more likely to underestimate their relative ranking than male students. In a follow-up randomized experiment, I provided treatment group students with information about their rankings and about expected future incomes for STEM and non-STEM majors. The treated students became 8.5 percentage points more likely to choose a STEM major, and these effects are driven by female students. The analysis indicates that undergraduate students do not correctly estimate their relative performance, and providing students with precise information helps them make more informed choices, encouraging them to change major to a STEM field. Chapter 2 (joint with Robert McMillan and Hammad Shaikh) examines why university students often seek to enrol in less advanced courses despite being eligible for challenging courses that may be more beneficial for the development of their skills. Through experiments, we find that providing an information session significantly increases the probability of eligible first years enrolling in the more rigorous second-year courses. When we send students emails about the advanced courses rather than invite them to an information session, the effects become statistically insignificant. Our results shed light on the determinants of student course selection. Chapter 3 studies how receiving first-year financial aid affects the second-year student re-enrolment decision. After controlling for institution fixed effects, I find that financial aid, despite its potential to improve student re-enrolment, has statistically insignificant effects. In contrast, student attitudes toward higher education do have statistically significant effects on re-enrolment rates: if students believe that it is a "right decision" to pursue post-secondary education, the probability of re-enrolment increases by 3 percentage points. This chapter demonstrates that student attitudes, rather than financial aid, play a key role in determining student decisions to continue studying.