EconTalk Podcast on Education

Arnold Kling, economist and teacher, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about recent technological innovations in education and Kling's forecast for their impact on learning and how they might affect traditional education. Examples include the recent explosion of online lessons and classes, new teaching styles that exploit those offerings, and the nature of learning in various kinds of classrooms and student-teacher interactions.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/10/kling_on_educat.html

New NBER Working Papers on Development and Behavioural Economics

The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance
Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, Susanne Neckermann, Sally Sadoff

NBER Working Paper No. 18165
Issued in June 2012
NBER Program(s):   ED   PE

A long line of research on behavioral economics has established the importance of factors that are typically absent from the standard economic framework: reference dependent preferences, hyperbolic preferences, and the value placed on non-financial rewards. To date, these insights have had little impact on the way the educational system operates. Through a series of field experiments involving thousands of primary and secondary school students, we demonstrate the power of behavioral economics to influence educational performance. Several insights emerge. First, we find that incentives framed as losses have more robust effects than comparable incentives framed as gains. Second, we find that non-financial incentives are considerably more cost-effective than financial incentives for younger students, but were not effective with older students. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consistent with hyperbolic discounting, all motivating power of the incentives vanishes when rewards are handed out with a delay. Since the rewards to educational investment virtually always come with a delay, our results suggest that the current set of incentives may lead to underinvestment. For policymakers, our findings imply that in the absence of immediate incentives, many students put forth low effort on standardized tests, which may create biases in measures of student ability, teacher value added, school quality, and achievement gaps. 

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18165.pdf

The European Origins of Economic Development
William Easterly, Ross Levine

NBER Working Paper No. 18162
Issued in June 2012
NBER Program(s):   EFG   POL

A large literature suggests that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes. This literature has had a serious gap: no direct measure of colonial European settlement. In this paper, we (1) construct a new database on the European share of the population during the early stages of colonization and (2) examine its impact on the level of economic development today. We find a remarkably strong impact of colonial European settlement on development. According to one illustrative exercise, 47 percent of average global development levels today are attributable to Europeans. One of our most surprising findings is the positive effect of even a small minority European population during the colonial period on per capita income today, contradicting traditional and recent views. There is some evidence for an institutional channel, but our findings are most consistent with human capital playing a central role in the way that colonial European settlement affects development today.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18162.pdf

Do teachers make better parents? How teachers' children do better at school

My doctor used to have pictures of his kids on his surgery wall and it occurred to me, during a consultation, that they must be very healthy. Well that is what you would expect I think? One would expect them to have a healthy lifestyle and generally not to go short on medical care. It then occurred to me that, by a similar logic, one might expect the children of educators to do well at school. There might be a genetic link, of course. Educator-parents could offer practical help with tuition or perhaps just help imbue an appreciation of education. And in a world where information on school quality is very limited (Ireland being a particularly good example, alas) one would expect teachers to make better decisions about the choice of schools for their own kids: when you are in the business you know what’s what.

So I decided to investigate using PISA data which has detailed data on parents occupation and other relevant data. The resulting paper has just been published in Regional and Sectoral Economic Studies.

Do teachers make better parents? The differential performance of teachers children at school

This paper investigates whether teenagers are educationally advantaged if their parents are educators, using data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Great Britain and Ireland from 2000. Examining whether teachers’ children do better at tests of reading ability, the results show that children whose fathers teach at third level or whose mothers teach at second level do better. The paper also shows that teenagers are more likely to be helped with their schoolwork if their mothers are educators. The evidence tends to suggest that where teenagers benefit from a parent as a teacher it is through specific assistance from the mother and a more general effect from the father.

Student Effort, Educational Attainment and the World Cup

There was a paper delivered today by Simon Burgess (Bristol University); on international football tournaments, study effort and GCSE exam performance; at the UCD Geary Behavioural Seminar Series. Today's seminar paper, "Student Effort, Educational Attainment and the World Cup" (with Rob Metcalfe and Steven Proud) is not online yet, but readers can investigate further research by the speaker: here.

An abstract for today's paper is available here on the website of the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER). The authors "use a sharp, exogenous and repeated change in the value of leisure to identify the impact of student effort on educational performance. Performance is measured using the universal high-stakes tests that students in schools in England take at the end of compulsory schooling. The treatment arises from the fact that the world’s major international football tournaments overlap with the exam period in schools in England, well known to be a nation obsessed with football."

Professor Burgess is Director of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation (CMPO). For those interested in research on the economics of education (and other domains of applied micro), the CMPO blog and twitter feed are worth following.

Transition to 3rd level conference

A conference on the transition to 3rd level education was held in UCD today. The focus was on the possibility and desirability of changes to the present "poinst system". The papers are available from the web site and are worth studying.

Time in the class and educational attainment: evidence from PISA

In the soul searching that has followed the release of the Leaving & Junior Certificate exams and particularly in the context of the maths results some commentators have pointed to the relatively low hours in class spent by Irish students. Does it actually matter? This paper shows that it does:

Do Differences in School's Instruction Time Explain International Achievement Gaps in Maths, Science and Language? Evidence from Developed and Developing Countries
Victor Lavy
There are large differences across countries in instructional time in schooling institutions. Can these differences explain some of the differences across countries in pupils' achievements in different subjects? What is the likely impact of changes in instructional time? While research in recent years provides convincing evidence about the effect of several inputs in the education production function, there is limited evidence on the effect of classroom instructional time. Such evidence is of policy relevance in many countries, and it became very concrete recently as President Barrack Obama announced the goal of extending the school week and year as a central objective in his proposed education reform for the US. In this paper, I estimate the effects of instructional time on students' academic achievement in math, science and language. I estimate linear and non-linear instructional time effects controlling for unobserved heterogeneity of both pupils and schools. The evidence from a sample of 15 year olds from over fifty countries that participated in PISA 2006 consistently shows that instructional time has a positive and significant effect on test scores. The effect is large relative to the standard deviation of the within pupil test score distribution. The OLS results are highly biased upward but the within student estimates are very similar across groups of developed and middle-income countries. However, the estimated effect of instructional time in the sample of developing countries is much lower than the effect size in the developed countries. Several checks for threats of identification support the causal interpretation of this evidence. I obtain very similar results when I use as an alternative data from primary and middle schools in Israel and a somewhat different identification strategy

Does Homework Matter?

IZA DP No. 5547

Ozkan Eren, Daniel J. Henderson:

Are We Wasting Our Children's Time by Giving Them More Homework?

(forthcoming in: Economics of Education Review)

Abstract:
Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and history are shown to have little to no impact on their respective test scores.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp5547.pdf

Studying Abroad and Labour Market Mobility

STUDYING ABROAD AND THE EFFECT ON INTERNATIONAL LABOUR MARKET MOBILITY: EVIDENCE FROM THE INTRODUCTION OF ERASMUS

Matthias Parey and Fabian Waldinger

Economic Journal, 121 (March) 2011, 194–222

We investigate the effect of studying abroad on international labour market mobility later in life for university graduates. We exploit the introduction and expansion of the European ERASMUS student exchange programme as an instrument for studying abroad. We find that studying abroad increases an individual’s probability of working in a foreign country by about 15 percentage points. We investigate heterogeneity in returns according to parental education and the student’s financial situation. Furthermore, we suggest mechanisms through which the effect of studying abroad may operate.

Do Higher Grades Mean Better Health?

The relationship between education and health has been discussed several times on this blog, most recently by Kevin. Kevin mentioned that there is a positive socioeconomic gradient: more educated people have better health on average. However, this does not imply that one causes the other. Kevin also mentioned recent research by Nils Braakmann, which examines the relationship between education and health, exploiting exogenous variation from a compulsory schooling law in the UK. Braakmann's results indicate "neither an effect of education on various health related measures nor an effect on health related behaviour, e.g., smoking, drinking or eating various types of food."

An interesting way of moving this research topic forward could be to focus more on quality of education rather than quantity of education. While there are many ways to consider how best to measure quality, one outcome that differentiates between students is grade point average, or grades. This metric has been the source of much debate (some of which I mentioned yesterday), but there is already some research which has set about examining the relationship between grades and health. (As an aside, readers may be interested to know that there is a positive relationship between college grades and subsequent earnings, as reported by McIntosh (2006), Loury and Garman (1995), Jones and Jackson (1990), Filer (1983) and Wise (1975).)

The research examining the relationship between grades and health came to my attention via an article by Roni Caryn Rabin in the Health section of the New York Times. The article refers to research done by Dr. Pamela Herd, and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The research uses the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has been following more than 10,000 people who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. "Those students who finished in the top 25 percent of their high school class were healthier, decades later, than the ones who finished in the bottom quarter... Even among those who each had 12 years of education, the person who performed better had better health".

Dr. Herd considered the possibility that better non-cognitive ability (or certain personality traits) could be driving both academic performance and health behaviour. NYT journalist Rabin provides more detail on Dr. Herd's thoughts on the matter:

"One explanation is that the same psychological characteristics that make for a hardworking student — like conscientiousness, dependability, good study habits and following the rules — also shape healthy behaviors. But when Dr. Herd examined personality surveys the graduates of 1957 filled out, controlling for variables like family background and childhood health, she didn’t find a strong correlation with health status... She’s convinced there’s something about the actual mastering of academic material that’s vital... the process of developing critical thinking skills and improving cognitive function."

What Do Grades Really Mean?

The Christmas Day edition of the New York Times carried an interesting article entitled "A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean". The motivation for the article was based around concerns relating to grade inflation, a topic which has been discussed before on this blog; for example here. There are also concerns on the part of students: "In hard economic times, students worry that professors who are stingy with the A’s will leave them at a disadvantage in graduate school admissions and employment." Interestingly, the NYT article states that: "Princeton adopted guidelines in 2004 providing that no more than 35 percent of undergraduate grades should be A’s, a policy that remains controversial on campus." According to the Ivy Gate Blog, Princeton have studied the effects on admissions rates to top medical schools and law schools, and found no effect. It was also reported in the NYT article that "Dartmouth transcripts include median grades, along with the number of courses in which the student exceeded, equaled or came in lower than those medians. Columbia transcripts show the percentage of students in the course who earned an A."

There is also reference to some academic research in the NYT article. In 1996, Cornell’s faculty adopted a “truth in grading” policy, and median grades were posted online starting in 1998. The policy called for median grades to be shown on transcripts as soon as student-records technology made that possible, but that did not happen until a full decade later. "While the median grades were available only online, a study by three Cornell economists found a large increase in enrollment in courses with a median grade of A — further driving grade inflation." This is suggestive of students enrolling in classes where it easier to obtain higher grade-scores; an issue which I raised before in relation to the Irish Leaving Certificate: the final examination at the end of second-level education Ireland.

Fixed or Random Effects?

New IZA Working Paper

The Choice Between Fixed and Random Effects Models: Some Considerations for Educational Research

Paul Clarke, Claire Crawford, Fiona Steele, Anna Vignoles

Abstract:
We discuss fixed and random effects models in the context of educational research and set out the assumptions behind the two approaches. To illustrate the issues, we analyse the determinants of pupil achievement in primary school, using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. We conclude that a fixed effects approach will be preferable in scenarios where the primary interest is in policy-relevant inference of the effects of individual characteristics, but the process through which pupils are selected into schools is poorly understood or the data are too limited to adjust for the effects of selection. In this context, the robustness of the fixed effects approach to the random effects assumption is attractive, and educational researchers should consider using it, even if only to assess the robustness of estimates obtained from random effects models. When the selection mechanism is fairly well understood and the researcher has access to rich data, the random effects model should be preferred because it can produce policy-relevant estimates while allowing a wider range of research questions to be addressed. Moreover, random effects estimators of regression coefficients and shrinkage estimators of school effects are more statistically efficient than those for fixed effects.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp5287.pdf

"Free college tuition has failed to open doors to all"

Sean Flynn in the Irish Times today emphasizes that socio-economic factors are still key in deciding whether someone attends university or not.

Incentives and Penalties for Third-Level Colleges

Writing on his blog, Ferdinand von-Prondzynski discusses in detail a report in the Irish Independent newspaper, which states that Irish higher education institutions will, under the framework of reforms to be recommended in the Hunt Report, face a combination of incentives and penalties. More specifically, "under a new funding system, colleges will receive reduced ‘core’ grants from the Exchequer. They will then be offered financial ‘incentives’ to meet targets in areas such as the retention of students, the rate of course completion, increasing access to college, teaching standards and research. If they fail to meet these targets, they will face financial penalties."

Ferdinand makes the point that a student retention target can easily be met by lowering the demands made by programmes of study, or moderating the severity of marking and assessment. He also states that "there is already a distinct financial penalty for student non-completion. A student who drops out will cause an immediate financial loss, because his or her fees (as paid by the state) and their part of the recurrent grant disappears". Furthermore, Ferdinand notes that if the HEA were to impose a penalty and withdraw further funds, this would directly lead to a lowering of quality of provision for those students who remain.

In addition to this, one could argue that it is not much good giving instiutions a financial reward for something that they need finance to achieve. Improving student retention will require enhanced student services, which in turn will cost money. Research by Joshua Angrist, Daniel Lang and Philip Oreopoulos shows that student services improve retention and achievement for females at Canadian colleges, even when incentives are also provided. The picture for males seems more complicated, but we do know from this Canadian study that females are more likely to use services than males. We also know from the recent HEA report, Study of Progression in Irish Higher Education, that males are more likely than females to not complete their course (17% male to 13% female non-completion rates).

From reading the accompanying HEA press release, it has come to my attention that there was a conference on student retention held in Dublin last Thursday. If one scrolls down on this webpage from the Irish Learning Technology Association, the flier can be seen. An American perspective was outlined by Prof. Vincent Tinto, Syracuse University, New York. Prof. Tinto's address, and presentations by other delegates can be accessed on this page of the HEA website. On a related note, readers may be interested to know that the full programme has been announced for the upcoming ESRI Higher Education Policy Conference on November 16th.

Class Size in Higher Education

The role of class-size in primary education has between discussed before on this blog. Earlier this year Kevin and Mark both posted interesting comments on the analysis of secondary data. In addition, I recently mentioned that data on primary-school class sizes in Ireland are available for the last four years by primary-school and class-room. Those looking for an introduction to how economists view the importance of class size in primary education could do worse than investigate this debate between Alan Krueger, Eric Hanushek and Jennifer King Rice.

"Alan Krueger maintains that smaller class sizes can improve students’ performance and future earnings prospects. He challenges Prof. Hanushek’s widely cited analysis of the class size literature, arguing that it gives disproportionate weight to single studies that include a large number of estimates... Jennifer King Rice brings a third-party perspective to the debate. She addresses each author’s arguments and focuses on the policy implications of the class size literature."

As educational achievement in higher education is often discussed on this blog, it seems salient to ask what we know about the importance of class size in higher education. To begin, it is helpful to point out that much of the work using education production functions has concentrated on the educational attainment of pupils in compulsory schooling, with less attention paid to higher education (Arulampalam, Naylor and Smith, 2009). The common inputs in education production functions are things like school resources, teacher quality, and family attributes, and the outcome is student achievement (Hanushek, 2007). However, there is a precedent for the theoretical consideration of higher education production functions (Freire and Silva, 1975; Johnson, 1978; Hopkins, 1990; Douglas and Sulock, 1995). There is also a much wider empirical literature on higher education production functions, in which researchers give attention to student inputs, in particular: lecture attendance and additional hours of study.

Looking at the evidence on class size in higher education, one result is that smaller classes do not translate into gains in achievement (Martins and Walker, 2006). Looking at economics students only, Kennedy and Siegfried (1997) find the same result i.e. that class size does not affect student achievement. Other work by Gleason shows that the same holds for mathematics students.

The opposite result (that class size matters) is found in a study examining peer effects and class size in higher education; Machado and Vera-Hernandez (2010) find that class size negatively influences medium ability college students. Dillon and Kokkelenberg (2002) show that class size "has a negative logarithmic relationship to grades and that the effect on class size on grades differs across different category of student."

In a recent Vox article, Bandiera, Larcinese and Rasul (2010) state that the effect of increasing class size in tertiary education is not yet well understood. Drawing on their article forthcoming in the Economic Journal, Bandiera, Larcinese and Rasul describe how they estimate the effects of class size on students’ exam performance by comparing the same student’s performance to her own performance in courses with small and large class sizes. "Going from the average class of 56 to a class size of 89 would decrease the mark by 9% of the observed variation in marks within a given student. The effect is almost four times larger for students in the top 10%."

It seems that the debate on class size in higher education is just as lively as the debate on class size in primary education.

Tuesday Seminar: Matt Dickson

Dr Matt Dickson (University of Bristol) will be giving a talk in the Geary Behavioural Seminar Series next Tuesday, as follows:

Speaker: Dr Matt Dickson

Seminar Title: "The Causal Effect of Education on Wages Revisited"

Venue: Seminar room B003/4, Geary Institute

Date: Tuesday 12th October 2010

Time: 1pm

The Lake Wobegon Effect in Student Self-Reported Data

The Lake Wobegon effect, as described by Wikipedia, is also known as illusory superiority or the above average effect. It is a "cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits." The phraseology of the Lake Wobegon effect comes from Garrison Keillor's fictional town, Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average".

In 1994, Maxwell and Lopus published an article in the American Economic Review: The Lake Wobegon Effect in Student Self-Reported Data. According to the authors, overstated achievement may produce biased estimates of the relationship between achievement and educational inputs, if overstatement is correlated with achievement. Maxwell and Lopus produce evidence for biases which stem from two sources. First, below-average students tend to inflate their academic achievements, and second, they often fail to report their inferior accomplishments.

In a more recent paper (Journal of Economic Education, 2010), Haley, Johnson and McGee examine whether using student-survey data in place of official records data meaningfully biases regression estimates. They motivate their contribution by noting a useful statistical feature of overreporting on bounded variables such as grade point average. "Specifically, the misreports will be negatively correlated with the true grade point average, yielding a form of nonclassical measurement error that actually counteracts the bias." The authors connect this observation to reliability ratios used in labour economics. In two applications, they find that it is unnecessary to correct for the bias from the Lake Wobegon effect because it is so small.

First Lisbon Research Workshop on Economics and Econometrics of Education

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for presenting and debating current cutting-edge research on the topics of economics and econometrics of education.

Guest Speakers:

* Eric Hanushek (Stanford University)
* Daniele Checchi (University of Milan)
* Brian P. McCall (University of Michigan)
* William Schmidt (Michigan State University)

Topics of Interest:

Authors are invited to submit papers in all areas of economics of education, but preferably with an emphasis on the following topics:

* The role of education/human capital in economic growth
* Determinants of students/schools educational performance
* Education, skills, employability and the labor market
* International comparisons in education

The conference will take place on the 7th and 8th January, 2010. Deadline for paper submissions: October 15, 2010. More details available on the conference website.

Economic Journal: New Empirical Analysis in the Economics of Education

This month’s Economic Journal features a series of articles on the economics of education, including:

The Impact of Diagnostic Feedback to Teachers on Student Learning: Experimental Evidence from India*
Karthik Muralidharan Venkatesh Sundararaman

Are Educational Vouchers Only Redistributive?*
Eric Bettinger Michael Kremer Juan E. Saavedra

'Every Catholic Child in a Catholic School': Historical Resistance to State Schooling, Contemporary Private Competition and Student Achievement across Countries*
Martin R. West Ludger Woessmann

You Get What You Pay For: Incentives and Selection in the Education System*
Thomas Dohmen Armin Falk

Ethnicity and Educational Achievement in Compulsory Schooling*
Christian Dustmann Stephen Machin Uta Schönberg

From an Irish perspective, the article on the effects of private schooling which uses historical prevalence of Catholicism as an instrument is particularly interesting. There is also a book review of Akerlof and Shiller’s `Animal Spirits’. Link.

Colm Harmon on Economics of Education

Colm Harmon is interviewed here on the Economics of Education

What did abolishing university fees in Ireland do?

This is the abstract for a working paper of mine just released by the Geary Institute (& the UCD Economics School), a less technical summary is at the end.
Abstract:
University tuition fees for undergraduates were abolished in Ireland in 1996. This paper examines the effect of this reform on the socio-economic gradient (SES) to determine whether the reform was successful in achieving its objective of promoting educational equality. It finds that the reform clearly did not have that effect. It is also shown that the university/SES gradient can be explained by differential performance at second level which also explains the gap between the sexes. Students from white collar backgrounds do significantly better in their final second level exams than the children of blue-collar workers. The results are very similar to recent findings for the UK. I also find that certain demographic characteristics have large negative effects on school performance i.e. having a disabled or deceased parent. The results show that the effect of SES on school performance is generally stronger for those at the lower end of the conditional distribution of academic attainment.

http://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/publications/workingpapers/gearywp201026.pdf

Non-technical summary

1. The paper shows how the abolition of university fees in 1995/96 did not help the chances of poorer children getting into university.

2. The paper also explains why this is the case:

• There was (& still is) excess demand for places: there is a shortage of places not students.
• The fee reduction benefitted well-off students, low income ones would have been exempt.
• Most importantly: the paper shows that it’s how students do in the Leaving that matters. The fact that the low income kids do worse in the Leaving is why they are less likely to progress. Changing fees didn’t change that.

3. The paper documents precisely how students from better off backgrounds do better in the Leaving.

• If your father is a professional, count on getting about 90 points more than if your father is a manual worker.
• If your father is “other white collar” count on getting about 50 points more.
• If your father is unemployed that “costs” you about 30 points.

4. The paper also shows

• That it’s the difference in Leaving Cert performance that explains why girls are more likely to progress to university
• That if a student’s father is disabled that their points are about 50 points lower
• That if one of their parents is deceased that their points are about 40 points lower.

5. A clear policy implication of this paper is that attempts to tackle inequalities in university access that do not address these performance differences at the Leaving Certificate won’t solve the problem.