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 educational development matter?

This essay provides reflections on the growth and influence of educational development, and the changes in approaches to teaching in universities. It also identifies some areas in which educational development and developers face challenges for the future, including educational technology, leadership and resistance to change.     

Does choice matter for school choice? An instrumental variables analysis of the effect of choice on parental satisfaction in charter schools

I employ ordered probit regression and a new instrumental variable to compare the Fall 2015 parental satisfaction survey results of open-enrollment charters to district-conversion charters. Choice status in Arkansas charter schools is largely beneficial to parental satisfaction. Specifically, parents with children in open-enrollment charters had between a 17-percentage point and 32-percentage point higher likelihood of grading their current school as an A or responding as Highly Satisfied in six of nine quality categories. I find no evidence that parents rate the quality of schools similar to the analysts at the Arkansas Department of Education or that satisfaction differs in oversubscribed schools.     

Reading and listening progress in segregated primary schools: Does ethnic and socioeconomic classroom composition matter?

This study aimed to investigate the relationship of classroom composition factors with reading and listening comprehension achievement and progress in socially and ethnically segregated primary schools in Flanders (Belgium). Specifically, using a three‐level multivariate repeated measures analysis, it examined the association of reading and listening achievement and progress with ethnic diversity, the proportion of non‐native students and the average socioeconomic status of the class, taking into account student characteristics. At the beginning and end of the school year, reading tests, listening tests and questionnaires were administered to a sample of 7‐ and 8‐year‐old students (n = 683) in 42 second‐grade classes. Students' listening comprehension achievement at the beginning of the school year was negatively related to having a home language other than the language of instruction and to classes with a high proportion of non‐native students. However, progress in listening comprehension was not significantly associated with any student or classroom composition factors. Students whose mothers had a lower level of education performed lower on reading comprehension at the beginning of the school year, while at the end of the school year students whose mothers had a higher level of education were at a greater disadvantage. Limitations of this study and directions for future research are discussed.     

Does IQ matter in adolescents' reading disability?

We studied the connection of IQ, reading disability (RD) and their interaction with reading, spelling and other cognitive skills in adolescents with average IQ and RD (n = 22), average IQ, non-RD (n = 71), below average IQ and RD (n = 29), and below average IQ non-RD (n = 33). IQ was not connected to reading and spelling in subjects without RD, but a connection to non-word spelling in subjects with RD existed. IQ and RD showed a connection to other cognitive skills (IQ to working memory, verbal memory and syntactic skills, RD to poor performance in text reading and rapid naming and both of them to reading comprehension, phonological and arithmetic skills), but no interaction existed. Our results are consistent with those of earlier studies showing that IQ does not play a significant role in the presentation of RD. However, adolescents with below average IQ and RD seemed to have much broader deficits in academically important skills such as arithmetic and reading comprehension than the other groups.     

Does domain matter? Monitoring accuracy across domains

Metacognition and Learning - Confidence and its accuracy have been most commonly examined in domains such as general knowledge and learning, with less study of other domains, such as applied...     

Does gender matter for the intergenerational transmission of education? Evidence from rural China

Many studies have examined whether children’s gender influences their educational attainment. However, there are limited studies on both the impact of parents’ education on children’s education and the educational gender gap in rural China. This paper investigates the impact of parents’ education on their children’s education from a gender perspective in rural China using comprehensive rural household data. We find that the educational gender gap in rural China has been decreasing over the last several decades. Moreover, the educational gender gap decreases as parents’ education increases. Parents’ initial educational attainment plays an important role in narrowing the educational gender gap.     

Does entrepreneurship education matter? Business students’ perspectives

The paper presents the findings of a mixed-methods study investigating the perceptions of business students in the Czech Republic towards entrepreneurship education, and examining the factors influencing their level of intention to be entrepreneurs. The results indicate that family background significantly influences the student’s entrepreneurial intention, and that participation in entrepreneurship-oriented courses positively influences the student’s level of self-efficacy. The study revealed further that business education had some effect on the student’s ability to gain the necessary knowledge for entrepreneurship. Another key finding was that entrepreneurship education specifically for business students has to equip students with entrepreneurial skills, attributes and behaviours. The results also suggest that entrepreneurship education is a contextually determined concept which requires modification of content and methods to meet the specific needs of particular target groups. The study has important implications for higher education institutions in terms of designing and managing effective entrepreneurship education.     

Socialization of new teachers: Does induction matter?

The present paper focuses on new teachers’ satisfaction with their first year of teaching from the perspective of socialization. The relationship between satisfaction with socialization and teacher background, school environment, placement, and induction variables was examined. Data were collected from 243 Israeli beginning teachers by means of questionnaire. Results indicated that satisfaction during the induction year was moderately high. Hierarchical regression analysis showed five significant predictor variables: ecological support from mentor, help from the principal, assistance from other colleagues, workload, and having already completed teaching training. Support from mentors and school colleagues had the greatest impact on new teachers’ assimilation.     

Does simplifying the college financial aid process matter?

The IRS Data Retrieval Tool, a financial aid simplification tool accessed by 7 million students (nearly 40% of FAFSA filers) a year, was suddenly removed during the middle of the 2017 application cycle. Exploiting variation in 1,600 institutional deadlines influencing the amount of time students lacked access to the tool, I find a null effect of its paperwork reduction properties on college access outcomes. Form simplification alone seems unlikely to have the same beneficial impacts as personal assistance in the college financial aid setting, calling into question the notion that small hassle costs by themselves meaningfully deter program take-up.     

Electronic scoring of essays: Does topic matter?

The scoring of student essays by computer has generated much debate and subsequent research. The majority of the research thus far has focused on validating the automated scoring tools by comparing the electronic scores to human scores of writing or other measures of writing skills, and exploring the predictive validity of the automated scores. However, very little research has investigated possible effects of the essay prompts. This study endeavoured to do so by exploring test scores for three different prompts for the ACCUPLACER^® WritePlacer^® Plus test which is scored by the IntelliMetric^® automated scoring system. The results indicated that there was no significant difference among the prompts overall; among males, between males and females, by native language or in comparison to scores generated by human raters. However, there was a significant difference in mean scores by topic for females.     

Does learner expertise matter when designing emotional multimedia for learners of primary school mathematics?

Educational technology research and development - Recent research on multimedia learning has considered the integration of cognitive and affective aspects of media processing. The literature...     

Does task-focused versus task-avoidance behavior matter for literacy development in an orthographically consistent language?

We examined the importance of children’s classroom activity, defined as task-focused versus task-avoidance behavior, on different literacy outcomes in an orthographically consistent language. Greek children (n = 95) were tested in kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2 on measures of general cognitive ability, phonological awareness, RAN, and short-term memory. The teachers of the children also assessed their task-focused behavior. Nonword decoding, reading fluency, spelling, and reading comprehension measures were administered in grades 2 and 3. The results indicated that task-focused behavior accounted for unique variance in spelling and reading comprehension, even after controlling for the effects of autoregressor, non-verbal IQ, and phonological processing.     

Maltreatment type and behaviors: Does listening matter?

This article presents an exploratory assessment of whether children's perceptions of caseworker support (e.g. feeling listened to) moderates the relationship between the type of maltreatment and problematic behaviors. Relying on data collected for the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW I), this research measures how often children felt listened to by their caseworkers and the effect on the relationship between two types of maltreatment (e.g. physical abuse and neglect) and problematic child behaviors. Results indicate that whereas children reported feeling listened to most of the time, there are significant differences in the probabilities of problematic behavior scores between physically abused and neglected children according to how often they felt listened to. With the exception of those children who felt listened to all of the time, physically abused children have a higher probability of problematic behaviors than neglected children. Comparisons between the two maltreatment types indicate a greater impact of listening on physically abused children across the continuum of feeling listened to (e.g. never to all of the time), than for neglected children, except for at the highest level of listening, as results indicate a small, but significant difference indicating neglected children are more positively impacted by listening than physically abused kids. Implications for practice are that children's perceptions of support from caseworkers may influence behavioral outcomes differently according to maltreatment type. Additionally, these findings encourage the inclusion of children's perspectives regarding the relationships they have with caseworkers.     

Does the position of source information for multiple documents matter? Insights from two experiments

When processing information from multiple documents about a controversial topic, it is important to consider information about the respective documents’ sources. In two experiments, we investigated whether different ways of providing source information affects learners’ use of source information when trying to make sense of a controversy. Experiment 1 (123 participants) varied the position of source information before or after the contents as well as the integration of source information with the contents. When source information was integrated with contents, more participants tended to name the accurate answer when source information was presented before contents. However, for blocked (i.e. non-integrated) presentation, more participants gave an accurate answer when source information was presented after the contents. Experiment 2 (117 participants) tested whether this latter finding could be explained with a lack of conflict awareness when participants were confronted with all source information in a block before the contents. However, making learners aware of the conflicting nature of the documents before the learning phase did not change the pattern of results for the blocked presentation of source information. In contrast, highlighting the conflict just before learners answered the open-ended question resulted in more participants giving an accurate answer when source information was presented before rather than after the contents. These results are discussed taking into account the characteristics of the learning phase and the test phase, outlining various pathways for future research.     

Does what you study at age 14–16 matter for educational transitions post-16?

Abstract

This paper considers whether subject choice at 14–16 influences post-16 transitions, taking into account prior academic attainment and school characteristics, and if so, whether this accounts for socioeconomic, gender, and ethnic differences in access to post-16 education. We consider post-16 progression to full-time education, A-levels, and studying two or more facilitating subjects at A-level. We use ‘Next Steps’, a study of 16,000 people born in England in 1989–1990, linked to administrative education records (the National Pupil Database). We find that students pursuing an EBacc-eligible curriculum at 14–16 had a greater probability of progression to all post-16 educational outcomes, while the reverse was true for students taking an applied GCSE subject. Curriculum differences did not explain the social class differences in post-16 progression, but an academic curriculum was equally valuable for working-class as for middle-class pupils. Pursuing an EBacc-eligible curriculum particularly strongly increased the chances of girls and white young people staying in the educational pipeline, whereas applied subjects were particularly detrimental for girls. An EBacc-eligible curriculum at age 14–16 increased the chances of studying subjects preferred by Russell Group universities at A-level.