College Student Responses to Web and Paper Surveys: Does Mode Matter?

We examined the responses of 58,288 college students to 8 scales involving 53 items from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to gauge whether individuals respond differently to surveys administered via the Web and paper. Multivariate regression analyses indicated that mode effects were generally small. However, students who completed the Web-based survey responded more favorably than paper on all 8 scales. These patterns generally held for both women and men, and younger and older students. Interestingly, the largest effect was found for a scale of items involving computing and information technology.     

Does Graduating from a Private University Make a Difference? Evidence from Italy

The main aim of this article is to explore similarities and differences in the institutional features of private and state universities in the Italian higher education system and to assess whether graduating from a private university conveys advantages in the labour market. In the first part we use administrative data to describe the main institutional features of the two types of university, looking at organisational aspects, enrolments and graduates, financial resources, tuition fees, and teachers' characteristics. In the second part we develop a theoretical framework looking at sociological and economic theories of education and labour market, from which we derive some hypotheses on the expected results. In the last part, we apply a propensity score matching analysis on data from the Italian University Graduates Survey conducted in 2007 by the Italian National Institute of Statistics, which provides information on more than 40,000 graduates who obtained their degree in 2004. The main results indicate that graduates from private universities are younger, have a higher socio-economic background and a slightly better previous school career than those from state universities. Contrary to a widespread belief, once accounted for self-selection into the type of university using a wide range of variables, graduating from a private university has neither a significant nor a substantial effect on employment probability, hourly wage and occupational level three years after graduation.     

Does high-quality professional development make a difference? Evidence from TIMSS

Abstract

While professional development has been emphasised in many countries, few comparative studies have examined the degree of teachers’ participation in professional development and its effect on teachers. Using the TIMSS 2007 data, this study analyses to what extent teachers participated in professional development in 50 TIMSS countries and examines the relationship among high-quality teachers’ professional development, teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and job satisfaction. The study found that the extent to which teachers have participated in professional developmental activities was surprisingly low. In particular, teachers in 47 countries have rarely participated in active learning. The study also found that high-quality teacher professional development was significantly associated with greater job satisfaction, higher expectations for student performance and more positive attitudes in teachers concerning their implementing the school’s curriculum. Policy implications for professional development are discussed.     

Can Service Bureaus Be a Part of the College Admissions Strategy?

Colleges and universities nationwide are facing declining enrollment resulting in declining revenue. Fewer 18-24 year olds, rising college costs and decreasing financial aid are causing admissions officers to become more agressive in their recruitment process. Well-targeted direct marketing campaigns personally designed to meet individual students' needs will allow college admissions personnel to effectively communciate with prospective students and parents. Utilizing the services of a service bureau provides colleges and universities a means to gain expertise in direct marketing areas and keep the costs under control at the same time.     

Does intensive coaching reduce school dropout? Evidence from a randomized experiment

School dropout is an important social and economic problem. This paper investigates the effect of an intensive coaching program aimed at reducing school dropout rates among students aged 16–20. Students received support and guidance with their study activities, personal problems and internships in firms. The coaching program lasted one or two years. Students were randomly assigned to the coaching program. We find that one year of coaching reduced school dropout rates by more than 40% from 17 to 10 percentage points. The second year of coaching further reduced school dropout by 1 percentage point. The program is most effective for students with a high ex-ante probability of dropping out, such as students no longer obliged to be in formal education, male students, and students not living with both parents. Cost-benefit analysis suggests that one year of coaching is likely to yield a net social gain.     

Who Deserves a Seat?: Colorblind Public Opinion of College Admissions Policy

Using critical discourse analysis, this study assesses reader comments to newspaper articles on the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin Supreme Court case. The Fisher case challenges the consideration of race in the college admissions process at UT. Findings show that this racial equity practice was framed as being antithetical to individualism, merit, and competition. Many comments, divorced from social and historical contexts, used colorblind rationale to justify their opposition to affirmative action yet relied heavily on popular polarizing racial discourse in their argumentation. Social policy implications related to facilitating college diversity and promoting educational equity are presented.     

Does cram schooling matter? Who goes to cram schools? Evidence from Taiwan

Attendance at cram schools is an experience that the majority of Taiwanese have while growing up. However, the incidence and impact of cram schooling are still understudied and have yet received much attention. In this paper, I first illustrate the development of cram schools in Taiwan, and demonstrate the important changes on institutional factors and legitimacy of cram schools. Then I use data collected by Taiwan Education Panel Survey to investigate the net effect of cram schooling on students’ academic performance, and to test whether the opportunity of cram school participation reflects specific patterns of stratification.Empirical results indicate that cram schooling does matter: attending cram schools has a significantly positive effect on a student's analytical ability and mathematical performance. However, cram school participation does not reflect specific patterns of social stratification: the opportunity of going to a cram school for a male student is not significantly different from that of a female; the effects of family background on students’ cram school participation are not as critical as they were in the past.     

Does schooling really lead to alienation from village life? Evidence from three pacific island communities

The literature of education and development, including some national development plans, suggests a widespread endorsement of the idea that formal education, especially academic schooling, produces school-leavers who are dissatisfied with rural life, who despise manual labour, who aspire unrealistically to white-collar jobs, and who migrate to urban areas upon completion of their schooling. Little empirical research has been done in Oceania to test these beliefs. Research in Western Samoa, American Samoa and Kiribati suggests that student aspirations and attitudes are more ambivalent, and less decidedly pro-urban/modern sector, than is usually assumed in the literature.     

Does prior mathematics knowledge really lead to variation in elementary statistics performance? Evidence from a developing country

A model incorporating prerequisite mathematics performance and other variables deemed to be associated with learning elementary statistics (ES) is developed. The relationship between ES performance and the explanatory variables is well represented by the logistics form. Aptitude, effort and motivation are the only significant explanatory variables of ES performance. Since prerequisite mathematics is not significant, statistical thinking at the tertiary level may be mostly intuitive and non-mathematical. Students with low aptitude experience increasing returns to effort over the first half of the feasible effort interval, while high-aptitude students experience diminishing returns at all levels of effort. The levels of effort required to achieve a minimum pass are interpreted.     

Does Online Comprehension Monitoring Make a Unique Contribution to Reading Comprehension in Beginning Readers? Evidence from eye movements

The goal of this study was to investigate the nature of online comprehension monitoring, its predictors, and its relation to reading comprehension. Questions were concerned with (a) beginning readers’ sensitivity to inconsistencies, (b) predictors of online comprehension monitoring, and (c) the relation of online comprehension monitoring to reading comprehension over and above word reading and listening comprehension. Using eye tracking technology, online comprehension monitoring was measured as the amount of time spent rereading target implausible words and looking back at surrounding contexts. Results from 319 second graders revealed that children spent greater time fixating on inconsistent than consistent words and engaged in more frequent lookbacks. Comprehension monitoring was explained by both word reading and listening comprehension. However, comprehension monitoring did not uniquely predict reading comprehension after accounting for word reading and listening comprehension. These results provide insight into the nature of comprehension monitoring and its role in reading comprehension for beginning readers.     

Does high school quality matter? Evidence from admissions data

This paper examines the effect of attending elite private high school on college placement using admissions data from the most selective high school in a large metropolitan area. To overcome omitted variable bias, we limit the sample to admitted applicants and control directly for the scores assigned by admissions based on in-depth analyses of the applicants and their families. In addition, we control for a wide set of covariates including student and family characteristics and entrance exam scores. Results indicate that attending selective private high school rather than other public and private high schools causes students to attend more selective universities. Effects are driven by gains for girls and students from lower-income neighborhoods.     

Morningness–Eveningness and College Advising: A Road to Student Success?

In addressing the challenges faced by E‐type (evening‐type) students, researchers have pointed to the need for school schedules that reflect chronotypic concerns and the recognition of the importance of sleep for academic achievement and well‐being. One approach to dealing with this issue for adolescent students has been to move the start of the school day later. In college, however, schedules become more varied and the social context in which these challenges occur differs requiring more individualized approaches to scheduling. In spite of this, morningness–eveningness is rarely considered by college administrators, advisors, or individuals involved in student services. It is important that faculty and staff who work with students be aware of chronotypical influences on classroom performance and other aspects of student life so that they can help them succeed in college and beyond.     

Does attending a STEM high school improve student performance? Evidence from New York City

We investigate the role of specialized science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) high schools in New York City (NYC) in promoting performance in science and mathematics and in closing the gender and race gaps in STEM subjects. Using administrative data covering several recent cohorts of public school students and a rich variety of high schools including over 30 STEMs, we estimate the effect of attending a STEM high school on a variety of student outcomes, including test taking and performance on specialized science and mathematics examinations. While comparisons of means indicate an advantage to attending a STEM school, more thorough analysis conditioning on a rich set of covariates, including previous grade test performance, reduces or eliminates this advantage. Females and males in STEMs do better than their counterparts in Non-STEMs, but the gender gap is also larger in these schools. We also find that the black-white and Hispanic-white gaps are smaller in STEM relative to Non-STEM schools across almost all outcomes, but the Asian-white gap, in contrast, is larger in STEMs relative to Non-STEMs.     

Does relative grading help male students? Evidence from a field experiment in the classroom

We conduct a framed field experiment at a Dutch university to compare student effort provision and exam performance under the two most prevalent evaluation practices: absolute (criterion-referenced) and relative (norm-referenced) grading. We hypothesize that the rank-order tournament created by relative grading will increase effort provision and performance among students with competitive preferences. We use student gender and survey measures (self-reported as well as incentivized) as proxies for competitiveness. Contrary to our expectations, we find no significant impact of relative grading on preparation behavior or exam scores, neither among men nor among students with higher measures of competitiveness. We discuss several potential explanations for this finding, and argue that it is likely attributable to the low value that students in our sample attach to academic excellence.     

Promoting scientific faculties: Does it work? Evidence from Italy

In reaction to the OECD-wide declining trend in scientific enrollments, the Italian government launched a policy in 2005 to promote the study of science at the university. The policy promoted extra-curricular activities for secondary school students in Chemistry, Physics, Math and Materials Science. This article evaluates the policy impact on students’ choice of the field of study. We use an intention to treat effect and administrative data on enrollment at two Italian universities. The findings indicate that the probability of enrolling in a scientific track increases by 3% for males. We find no effect for females. Participating in activities in Math increases the probability of enrolling in Physics and vice versa. The treatment had also a positive impact on enrollments in Pharmacy. The results suggest that the policy was successful in correcting the labour market expectations of male students.     

Does sign language provide deaf children with an abstraction advantage? Evidence from a categorization task

The effects of sign language use on cognitive processes of second-generation deaf children were investigated through an intensional categorization task. A forced-choice paradigm was used to examine children's selections of schematic and categorical alternatives as associations to targets that differed in their related sign language characteristics. The results obtained from 48 deaf and hearing 6-year-olds suggest some differences in the categorization abilities and cognitive flexibility between the two groups of children. These differences appear to be explainable in terms of linguistic variables underlying French Sign Language.     

Does temporary interruption in postsecondary education induce a wage penalty? Evidence from Canada

Almost 40% of Canadian youth who left postsecondary education in 1999 had returned two years later. This paper investigates the extent to which schooling discontinuities affect post-graduation starting wages and whether the latter are influenced by the reasons behind these discontinuities. We use data from the 2007 National Graduate Survey. We apply Lewbel’s (2012) generated instruments approach. The source of identification is a heteroscedastic covariance restriction of the error terms that is a feature of many models of endogeneity. We also perform two-stage quantile regressions. We find a positive effect on wages of temporary interruption for men who held a full-time job during their out-of-school spell(s). Both men and women witness a wage decrease if their interruption depends on health issues. Women bear a wage penalty if their interruption is due to a part-time job, to lack of money, or is caused by reasons other than health, work, and money.     

Does class-size reduction close the achievement gap? Evidence from TIMSS 2011

Policies about reducing class size have been implemented in the US and Europe in the past decades. Only a few studies have discussed the effects of class size at different levels of student achievement, and their findings have been mixed. We employ quantile regression analysis, coupled with instrumental variables, to examine the causal effects of class size on 4th-grade mathematics achievement at various quantiles. We use data from 14 European countries from the 2011 sample of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Overall, there are no systematic patterns of class-size effects across quantiles. Class-size effects are generally non-significant and uniform at different achievement levels, which suggests that in most European countries class-size reduction does not have an impact on student achievement and does not close the achievement gap. However, combined estimates across countries indicate that high achievers may benefit more from class-size reduction.     

Does Competition Affect Schools' Performance? Evidence from Italy through OECD-PISA Data

This article evaluates the impact of competition on the performance of Italian schools. The study is based on policy experiments developed in 2000 by the Lombardy Regional government which introduced a voucher plan to encourage families to enrol their children in private schools. After this intervention, many other Regions launched similar policies. Despite the high political attention to this theme in Italy, there is almost no economic research on the possible role of such policies in fostering competition, and on the effects of competition on schools’ outputs. As there are not data collected by the Italian authorities for the purpose, the article uses the OECD-PISA 2006 dataset with some additional administrative information. The empirical analysis shows that while some indicators of school competition have been found significant in – positively – affecting schools’ performances (in terms of student achievement), there is not strong evidence that voucher policies implemented in the Lombardy Region did improve school competition.