Standard Education
Fictional Money, Real Costs: Impacts of Financial Salience on Disadvantaged Students
Claire Duquennois
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Disadvantaged students perform differentially worse when randomly given a financially salient mathematics exam. For students with socio-economic indicators below the national median, a 10 percentage point increase in the share of monetary themed questions depresses exam performance by 0.026 standard deviations, about 6% of their performance gap. Using question-level data, I confirm the role of financial salience by comparing performance on monetary and highly similar non-monetary questions. Leveraging the randomized ordering of questions, I identify an effect on subsequent questions, providing evidence that the attention capture effects of poverty affect policy relevant outcomes outside of experimental settings.
Rent-seeking through collective bargaining: Teachers unions and education production
Jason Cook, Stéphane Lavertu & Corbin Miller
Economics of Education Review, December 2021
Abstract:
We explore how teachers unions affect education production by comparing outcomes between districts allocating new tax revenue amidst collective bargaining negotiations and districts allocating tax revenue well before. Districts facing union pressure increase teacher salaries and benefits, spend down reserves, and experience no student achievement gains. Conversely, districts facing less pressure hire more teachers (instead of increasing compensation) and realize significant student achievement gains. We interpret these results as causal evidence of the negative impact of teacher rent seeking on education production, as the timing of district tax elections relative to collective bargaining appears to be as good as random.
Making Teaching Last: Long-Run Value-Added
Michael Gilraine & Nolan Pope
NBER Working Paper, December 2021
Abstract:
Teacher value-added (VA) measures how teachers improve their students' contemporaneous test scores. Many teachers, however, argue that contemporaneous test scores are a poor proxy for their permanent influence on students. This paper considers a new VA measure -- 'long-run VA' -- that captures teachers' contributions that persist by replacing contemporaneous test scores with subsequent test scores in VA estimation. We find that students assigned to high long-run VA teachers fare substantially better in terms of long-term outcomes. Policy simulations indicate that the use of long-run VA improves policy effectiveness by a factor of two compared to traditional VA measures.
The Equitable Distribution of Opportunity to Learn in Mathematics Textbooks
Morgan Polikoff et al.
AERA Open, December 2021
Abstract:
Low-income students and students of color are faced with pervasively lower levels of opportunity to learn compared with their peers, creating unequal opportunities for educational success. Textbooks, which serve as the backbone of the curriculum in most mathematics classrooms, present a potentially powerful tool to help mitigate unequal opportunity to learn across students. Using the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum framework, we investigate the content of commonly used eighth-grade math textbooks in California and the extent to which they align with the Common Core State Standards. We also explore the relationship between the variation in content coverage and alignment and student characteristics. We find poor alignment between the textbooks in our sample and the Common Core State Standards and low overall levels of cognitive demand, but only limited evidence of systematic differences in alignment or cognitive demand coverage associated with student characteristics at the school or district level.
Advancing mathematics by guiding human intuition with AI
Alex Davies et al.
Nature, 2 December 2021, Pages 70-74
Abstract:
The practice of mathematics involves discovering patterns and using these to formulate and prove conjectures, resulting in theorems. Since the 1960s, mathematicians have used computers to assist in the discovery of patterns and formulation of conjectures, most famously in the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, a Millennium Prize Problem. Here we provide examples of new fundamental results in pure mathematics that have been discovered with the assistance of machine learning — demonstrating a method by which machine learning can aid mathematicians in discovering new conjectures and theorems. We propose a process of using machine learning to discover potential patterns and relations between mathematical objects, understanding them with attribution techniques and using these observations to guide intuition and propose conjectures. We outline this machine-learning-guided framework and demonstrate its successful application to current research questions in distinct areas of pure mathematics, in each case showing how it led to meaningful mathematical contributions on important open problems: a new connection between the algebraic and geometric structure of knots, and a candidate algorithm predicted by the combinatorial invariance conjecture for symmetric groups. Our work may serve as a model for collaboration between the fields of mathematics and artificial intelligence (AI) that can achieve surprising results by leveraging the respective strengths of mathematicians and machine learning.
Language immersion and student achievement
Andrew Bibler
Education Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Language immersion education uses a non-English language for a significant portion of instruction. One goal is to develop bilingual students, which many argue provides cognitive benefits. Using data from school choice lotteries, I estimate the effect of random assignment to a language immersion school on achievement in math and reading. Winning the lottery has a statistically significant positive effect on math scores, and a positive but statistically insignificant effect on reading. Several peer and school characteristics are ruled out as non-language based alternative explanations for the higher math scores of lottery winners.
Charter School Practices and Student Selection: An Equilibrium Analysis
Dennis Epple, Francisco Martinez-Mora & Richard Romano
NBER Working Paper, December 2021
Abstract:
We model charter school entry and choice of educational practices. Student achievement depends on cognitive ability, motivation, effort, and match of school curriculum to ability. Exercising charter school autonomy over curriculum, to maximize achievement gains, the charter sets curriculum to attract the highest ability students. Achievement gains are modest, consistent with empirical evidence. We next investigate a no-excuses charter that not only chooses curriculum but also enforces an effort minimum. Consistent with the evidence, highly motivated students select into the charter, achievement gains are large, and the largest gains accrue to those who would be lower performers in public school.
A familiar face: Student-teacher rematches and student achievement
NaYoung Hwang, Brian Kisida & Cory Koedel
Economics of Education Review, December 2021
Abstract:
We use administrative data from Indiana to test whether student-teacher rematches in consecutive years affect student achievement. Using models that control for student and teacher fixed effects, we show that student-teacher rematches increase test scores in math and English Language Arts. The positive effects of rematching are constant over elementary and middle-school grades and more pronounced for historically underserved students. Our findings directly support strategies that aim to keep students and teachers together for longer periods of time during K-12 education. They are also consistent with the broader hypothesis that students benefit from increased student-teacher familiarity.
Teacher Pension Plan Incentives, Retirement Decisions, and Workforce Quality
Shawn Ni, Michael Podgursky & Xiqian Wang
Journal of Human Resources, January 2022, Pages 272-303
Abstract:
We analyze late-career teacher turnover induced by pension incentives. Using longitudinal data on Tennessee teachers, we find high-quality teachers less likely to retire conditional on age and experience. We estimate a structural model for retirement that allows high- and lower-quality teachers to have different work–retirement preferences and use it to simulate the effect of alternative pension plan designs. Enhancements to traditional plans accelerate teacher retirement and reduce average teacher quality, whereas defined contribution (DC) plans have the opposite effect. Under the current plan, targeted retention bonuses would delay retirement of high-quality teachers at relatively modest cost.
Sugar rush or sugar crash? Experimental evidence on the impact of sugary drinks in the classroom
Fritz Schiltz & Kristof De Witte
Health Economics, January 2022, Pages 215-232
Abstract:
Sugary drinks in schools have been demonized for their potential long-term contribution to rising obesity rates. Surprisingly, there is only little evidence on the immediate effects of sugary drinks in schools. This paper provides experimental evidence on the in-class effects of sugary drinks on behavior and student achievement. We randomly assigned 462 preschool children to receive sugary drinks or artificially sweetened drinks and collected data before and after consumption. Our findings suggest that the consumption of one sugary drink induces an initial “relaxing” effect for boys, before making them more restless. Girls' behavior is not significantly affected. We find a negative effect on student achievement for boys and a positive effect for girls. We show the robustness of the results across two field experiments.
The Long-Run Effects of Adolescent Athletic Participation on Women’s Health
Kevin Callison & Aaron Lowen
Economics & Human Biology, January 2022
Abstract:
Increased athletic opportunities have been shown to improve educational and labor force outcomes, however few studies have linked athletic participation to health later in life. We use the implementation of Title IX, legislation banning gender discrimination in educational programs in the U.S., to estimate the effect of increased access to high school athletic opportunities on women’s later life health. Our results indicate that increased participation leads to fewer days in poor mental health, reduced BMI and rates of obesity, lower smoking rates, and some evidence of a reduced likelihood of a diabetes diagnosis. However, we find no impact of high school athletic participation on the number of days in poor physical health and current exercise, and a positive relationship between participation and alcohol consumption.
Limited contracts, limited quality? Effects of adjunct instructors on student outcomes
Maria Zhu
Economics of Education Review, December 2021
Abstract:
A growing literature documents significant differences in college student outcomes between adjunct and full-time instructors, although less is known regarding the causes of these differences. Many existing studies implicitly treat instructor quality — as measured by an instructor’s effect on student outcomes — as a fixed trait. However, instructor quality itself may be sensitive to employment rank, given that adjunct and full-time instructors work under very different conditions. Understanding mechanisms driving these differences is important for informing policy decisions aimed at improving student outcomes. Using panel data on first-semester students at public colleges in Arkansas, this paper first establishes that adjuncts have significantly worse student outcomes than full-time counterparts on a number of metrics. Next, I investigate mechanisms underlying differences in outcomes across instructor rank. I take advantage of the panel structure of the data and use an instructor fixed effects approach to provide evidence that within instructors, student outcomes improve when the instructor is full-time, compared to when the instructor is an adjunct. Results indicates improving student outcomes is about more than just getting better instructors, since instructor quality is not a fixed trait. Rather, factors like an instructor’s conditions of employment and teaching and working environment may affect the outcomes of their students.
Increasing Success in Higher Education: The Relationships of Online Course Taking With College Completion and Time-to-Degree
Christian Fischer et al.
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, forthcoming
Abstract:
Online courses provide flexible learning opportunities, but research suggests that students may learn less and persist at lower rates compared to face-to-face settings. However, few studies have investigated more distal effects of online education. In this study, we analyzed 6 years of institutional data for three cohorts of students in 13 large majors (N = 10,572) at a public research university to examine distal effects of online course participation. Using online course offering as an instrumental variable for online course taking, we find that online course taking of major-required courses leads to higher likelihood of successful 4-year graduation and slightly accelerated time-to-degree. These results suggest that offering online courses may help students to more efficiently graduate college.
Empowering Education with Crowdfunding: The Role of Crowdfunded Resources and Crowd Screening
Chen Zhou, Manpreet Gill & Qiang Liu
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Crowdfunding has emerged as a market-based solution to give frontline complex public service employees the opportunity to acquire resources by advertising project proposals for donor patrons on crowdfunding platforms. However, whether crowdfunded resources can improve offline service outcomes, and if so, how and when, remains murky. Focusing on the context of public education crowdfunding and applying theories from crowdfunding and services marketing literature, the authors conceptualize that the combination of two factors — namely, teachers’ request for resources meant to satisfy unmet heterogeneous (i.e., diverse and evolving) intellectual needs of students and donors’ screening and approval (i.e., crowd screening) of promising projects — helps improve student academic achievement. Collating novel panel data from DonorsChoose and California Department of Education, the authors show that (1) crowdfunded resources positively affect student academic achievement, (2) student academic achievement improves with the increase in the heterogeneity of intellectual needs that crowdfunded resources likely satisfy, (3) crowd screening of project proposals plays a critical role in the offline effectiveness of crowdfunded resources, and (4) crowd screening effectiveness depends on the type of project.