Does money matter for schools?

There is considerable disagreement in the academic literature about whether raising school expenditure improves educational outcomes. Yet changing the level of resources is one of the key policy levers open to governments. In England, school expenditure has increased by about 40% since 2000. Thus assessing whether such spending has had an impact on educational outcomes is of paramount importance. We address this issue using data of better quality than what are often available in similar studies and test our identification assumption by use of a falsification test. We find that the increase in school expenditure over recent years has had a consistently positive effect on outcomes at the end of primary school. Back-of-envelope calculations suggest that the investment may well be cost-effective. There is also some evidence of heterogeneity in the effect of expenditure, with higher effects for students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.     

Evidence‐based practice and evaluation: from insight to impact

With the growing emphasis on accountability and evidence‐based practice, evaluation has become increasingly important in the contexts in which educational psychologists (EPs) practice. This paper describes a Target Monitoring and Evaluation (TME) system, derived from Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS) which was developed to evaluate outcomes of a wide range of interventions that were established as a result of an EP and an assistant EP involvement in two local authorities. Pupils made progress on between 94% and 97% of targets, and outcomes were significantly better than the baseline for both groups. Results are considered in terms of the value and usefulness of TME as an evaluation system and key issues relating to its implementation within EP practice are discussed.     

The role of educational choice in occupational gender segregation: Evidence from Trinidad and Tobago

We analyse the role of educational choice on the degree of occupational segregation in Trinidad and Tobago during a period in which educational policies intent on equating gender opportunities in education were implemented. To this end we utilize waves of the Trinidad and Tobago labour force survey over the period 1991–2004. Our results show that while educational segregation has fallen substantially over our sample period, this has not translated into less occupational segregation. This suggests that the educational policy has not been sufficient to combat occupational segregation. However, results at a more disaggregated level show that experiences have been heterogeneous across educational and occupational groups.     

Getting on the Front Page: Organizational Reputation, Status Signals, and the Impact of U.S. News and World Report on Student Decisions

Recent studies have suggested that a causal link exists between college rankings and subsequent admissions indicators. However, it is unclear how these effects vary across institutional type (i.e., national universities vs. liberal arts colleges) or whether these effects persist when controlling for other factors that affect admissions outcomes. Using admissions data for top-tier institutions from fall 1998 to fall 2005, we found that moving onto the front page of the U.S. News rankings provides a substantial boost in the following year’s admissions indicators for all institutions. In addition, the effect of moving up or down within the top tier has a strong impact on institutions ranked in the top 25, especially among national universities. In contrast, the admissions outcomes of liberal arts colleges—particularly those in the lower half of the top tier—were more strongly influenced by institutional prices. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Louisville, KY, November 2007.     

Neurodevelopmental Correlates of Theory of Mind in Preschool Children

Baseline electroencephalogram (EEG) data were collected from twenty-nine 4-year-old children who also completed batteries of representational theory-of-mind (RTM) tasks and executive functioning (EF) tasks. Neural sources of children's EEG alpha (6–9 Hz) were estimated and analyzed to determine whether individual differences in regional EEG alpha activity predicted children's RTM performance, while statistically controlling for children's age and EF skills. Results showed that individual differences in EEG alpha activity localized to the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC) and the right temporal–parietal juncture (rTPJ) were positively associated with children's RTM performance. These findings suggest that the maturation of dMPFC and rTPJ is a critical constituent of preschoolers' explicit theory-of-mind development.