Better Learn It
The Impact of Project-Based Learning on AP Exam Performance
Anna Rosefsky Saavedra et al.
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Harnessing a cluster randomized controlled trial, we estimated the impact on students’ advanced placement (AP) examination performance of a project-based learning (PBL) approach to AP compared with a lecture-based AP approach. Through PBL, teachers primarily play a facilitator role, while students work on complex tasks organized around central questions leading to a final product. We estimated positive and significant treatment effects on AP exam performance for the overall sample, within both AP courses studied, and within low- and high-income student groups. Results support teacher-driven adoption of the PBL AP approach within both courses studied, among districts with open-enrollment AP policies and supportive of PBL, for students from low- and high-income households.
The Effects of Teacher Quality on Adult Criminal Justice Contact
Evan Rose, Jonathan Schellenberg & Yotam Shem-Tov
NBER Working Paper, July 2022
Abstract:
This paper estimates teachers' impacts on their students' future criminal justice contact (CJC). Using a unique data set linking the universe of North Carolina public school data to administrative arrest records, we find a standard deviation of teacher effects on students' future arrests of 2.7 percentage points (11% of the sample mean). Teachers' effects on CJC are orthogonal to their effects on academic achievement, implying assignment to a high test score value-added teacher does not reduce future CJC. However, teachers who reduce suspensions and improve attendance substantially reduce future arrests. Similar patterns emerge when allowing teacher impacts to vary by student sex, race, socio-economic status, and school. The results suggest that the development of non-cognitive skills is central to the returns to education for crime and highlight an important dimension of teachers' social value missed by test score-based quality metrics.
An ounce of prevention, a pound of cure: The effects of college expansions on crime
Hamid Noghanibehambari & Nahid Tavassoli
International Review of Law and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we argue that the availability of colleges incentivizes college enrollment and, by increasing the opportunity cost of incarceration, it has the potential to reduce crime. We provide empirical evidence from college expansions in the US over the years 1974–2019 and implement a triple-difference identification strategy to compare the arrest rates of different age groups over time in counties that differ by their college expansions. The reduced-form results suggest significant reductions in arrest rates. The effects hold across main categories of crime and over a variety of specifications and a wide array of robustness checks. We utilize an event-study analysis and a series of placebo tests to rule out the problems of pre-trend and endogenous migration. We discuss the policy implications and potential social savings of college opening through reductions in crime.
Adjectives and adverbs in life sciences across 50 years: Implications for emotions and readability in academic texts
Ju Wen & Lei Lei
Scientometrics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Writing in a clear and simple language is critical for scientific communications. Previous studies argued that the use of adjectives and adverbs cluttered writing and made scientific text less readable. The present study aims to investigate if the articles in life sciences have become more cluttered and less readable across the past 50 years in terms of the use of adjectives and adverbs. The data that were used in the study were a large dataset of 775,456 scientific texts published between 1969 and 2019 in 123 scientific journals. Results showed that an increasing number of adjectives and adverbs were used and the readability of scientific texts have decreased in the examined years. More importantly, the use of emotion adjectives and adverbs also demonstrated an upward trend while that of nonemotion adjectives and adverbs did not increase. To our knowledge, this is probably the first large scale diachronic study on the use of adjectives and adverbs in scientific writing. Possible explanations to these findings were discussed.
Still Worth the Trip? School Busing Effects in Boston and New York
Joshua Angrist et al.
NBER Working Paper, July 2022
Abstract:
School assignment in Boston and New York City came to national attention in the 1970s as courts across the country tried to integrate schools. Today, district-wide choice allows Boston and New York students to enroll far from home, perhaps enhancing integration. Urban school transportation is increasingly costly, however, and has unclear integration and education consequences. We estimate the causal effects of non-neighborhood school enrollment and school travel on integration, achievement, and college enrollment using an identification strategy that exploits partly-random assignment in the Boston and New York school matches. Instrumental variables estimates suggest distance and travel boost integration for those who choose to travel, but have little or no effect on test scores and college attendance. We argue that small effects on educational outcomes reflect modest effects of distance and travel on school quality as measured by value-added.
Examining Human and Automated Ratings of Elementary Students’ Writing Quality: A Multivariate Generalizability Theory Application
Dandan Chen, Michael Hebert & Joshua Wilson
American Educational Research Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We used multivariate generalizability theory to examine the reliability of hand-scoring and automated essay scoring (AES) and to identify how these scoring methods could be used in conjunction to optimize writing assessment. Students (n = 113) included subsamples of struggling writers and non-struggling writers in Grades 3–5 drawn from a larger study. Students wrote six essays across three genres. All essays were hand-scored by four raters and an AES system called Project Essay Grade (PEG). Both scoring methods were highly reliable, but PEG was more reliable for non-struggling students, while hand-scoring was more reliable for struggling students. We provide recommendations regarding ways of optimizing writing assessment and blending hand-scoring with AES.
Screening with Multitasking
Michael Dinerstein & Isaac Opper
NBER Working Paper, July 2022
Abstract:
What happens when employers would like to screen their employees but only observe a subset of output? We specify a model in which heterogeneous employees respond by producing more of the observed output at the expense of the unobserved output. Though this substitution distorts output in the short-term, we derive three sufficient conditions under which the heterogenous response improves screening efficiency: 1) all employees place similar value on staying in their current role; 2) the employees' utility functions satisfy a variation of the traditional single-crossing condition; 3) employer and worker preferences over output are similar. We then assess these predictions empirically by studying a change to teacher tenure policy in New York City, which increased the role that a single measure -- test score value-added -- played in tenure decisions. We show that in response to the policy teachers increased test score value-added and decreased output that did not enter the tenure decision. The increase in test score value-added was largest for the teachers with more ability to improve students' untargeted outcomes, increasing their likelihood of getting tenure. We find that the endogenous response to the policy announcement reduced the screening efficiency gap -- defined as the reduction of screening efficiency stemming from the partial observability of output -- by 28%, effectively shifting some of the cost of partial observability from the post-tenure period to the pre-tenure period.
Higher Education and Local Educational Attainment: Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges
Lauren Russell, Lei Yu & Michael Andrews
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate how the presence of a college affects local educational attainment. As counterfactuals for current college locations, we use historical “runner-up” locations that were strongly considered to become college sites but were ultimately not chosen. We find that winning counties today have college degree attainment rates 56% higher than runner-up counties and more private-sector employment in human-capital-intensive industries. These effects are not driven primarily by recent in-migration of educated adults, and alternative public investments did not have similar effects on local educational attainment. The results indicate that colleges played an important role in shaping long-run local outcomes.
Do Universities Improve Local Economic Resilience?
Greg Howard, Russell Weinstein & Yuhao Yang
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use a novel identification strategy to investigate whether regional universities make their local economies more resilient. Our strategy is based on state governments using similar site-selection criteria to assign normal schools (to train teachers) and insane asylums between 1830 and 1930. Normal schools became larger regional universities while asylum properties mostly continue as small state-owned psychiatric health facilities. We find that a regional university roughly offsets the negative effects of manufacturing exposure. We show the resilience of regional public university spending is an important mechanism, and we show correlations consistent with bachelor's degree share also playing a mediating role.
Effects of 4-Day School Weeks on Older Adolescents: Examining Impacts of the Schedule on Academic Achievement, Attendance, and Behavior in High School
Emily Morton
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
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 4-day school week on high school students’ ACT scores, attendance, and disciplinary incidents during school. Results indicate that 4-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.
Do professors’ wages depend on students’ earnings?
João Ricardo Faria & Franklin Mixon
Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Survey data indicate that the average salary of full professors in the U.S. and the average starting salary of new college graduates in the U.S. have both grown over each of the past eight years. The positive association between these survey data is intuitively appealing in that if greater demand for education comes as a consequence of higher annual earnings accruing to individuals with more education, then an increase in the starting salaries of new college graduates should lead to an increase in the wages of college and university faculty. This paper is the first to study whether the demand for professors is derived from the demand for higher education. To do so, we model the interactions between the academic labour market and the market for college and university graduates, and we show that, in equilibrium, academic wages are independent of students’ earnings. This main characteristic of the equilibrium conditions of our formal model is supported by empirical analysis.
First Foot Forward: A Two-Step Econometric Method for Parsing and Estimating the Impacts of Multiple Identities
Andrew Hanks et al.
NBER Working Paper, July 2022
Abstract:
Marketing and strategy researchers have often studied how organizations navigate multiple identities in relation to category spanning but extant literature pays less attention to understanding how individuals do so. Moreover, current econometric approaches only scratch the surface with respect to addressing the impact of multiple identities in professional settings. As a model domain to study labor market returns when individuals have more than one identity, we focus on interdisciplinary dissertators in the United States since evidence shows clear uptrends in dissertators engaging multiple professional identities and unclear trends in their outcomes. Our novel estimation method leverages a two-step process to characterize salaries of interdisciplinary dissertators as functions of the identities (academic fields) they acquire as graduate students. We estimate a first-stage regression of log earnings for monodisciplinarians on field dummies and respondent characteristics. After capturing the estimated field coefficients, we then regress log earnings for interdisciplinarians on linear and non-linear functions of these coefficients. Our estimates robustly reject the hypothesis that interdisciplinarians receive a salary premium. We also find evidence that the academic market, but not other employment sectors, particularly compensates researchers based on their primary discipline, an outcome that challenges emphases on interdisciplinarity. While our findings for interdisciplinarians point to the primary identity holding predominant importance for doctoral graduates in the United States, our two-step method provides a framework for parsing and estimating the varied impacts of multiple identities across a wide range of contexts.
Research Grants Crowding Out and Crowding In Donations to Higher Education
Grant Gannaway, Garth Heutel & Michael Price
Education Finance and Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a dataset that includes every private donation made to a large public university from 1938 to 2012 and demographic information on all alumni, we examine the effects of public research funding on individual donations. Our dataset allows us to examine crowding effects on a small time scale and extensive donor characteristics. We estimate effects on the total number of donations (extensive margin) and on the average size of a donation (intensive margin). National Science Foundation research grants have a positive (crowd-in) effect on the extensive margin and a negative (crowd-out) effect on the intensive margin. We find no evidence of these effects from other sources of federal research funding. Previous donors and in-state residents respond differently to grants than do new donors and out-of-state residents, respectively.
On the Threshold: Impacts of Barely Passing High-School Exit Exams on Post-Secondary Enrollment and Completion
John Papay, Ann Mantil & Richard J. Murnane
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many states use high-school exit examinations to assess students’ career and college readiness in core subjects. We find meaningful consequences of barely passing the mathematics examination in Massachusetts, as opposed to just failing it. However, these impacts operate at different educational attainment margins for low-income and higher-income students. As in previous work, we find that barely passing increases the probability of graduating from high school for low-income (particularly urban low-income) students, but not for higher-income students. However, this pattern is reversed for 4-year college graduation. For higher-income students only, just passing the examination increases the probability of completing a 4-year college degree by 2.1 percentage points, a sizable effect given that only 13% of these students near the cutoff graduate.