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on Education |
| By: | Damon Clark; David Gill; Victoria Prowse; Mark Rush |
| Abstract: | Will college students who set goals for themselves work harder and achieve better outcomes? In theory, setting goals can help present-biased students to mitigate their self-control problem. In practice, there is little credible evidence on the causal effects on goal setting for college students. We report the result of two field experiments that involved almost four thousand college students in total. One experiments asked treated students to set goals for performance in the course; the other asked treated students to set goals for a particular task (completing online practice exams). Task-based goals had robust positive effects on the level of task completion, and task-based goals also increased course performance. We also find that performance-based goals had positive but small effects on course performance. We use a theoretical framework that builds on present bias and loss aversion to interpret our results. Since task-based goal setting is low-cost, scalable and logistically simple, we conclude that our findings have important implications for educational practice and future research. |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:feb:natura:00647&r=all |
| By: | Bergbauer, Annika B. (ifo Institute at the University of Munich); Hanushek, Eric A. (Hoover Institution, Stanford University, CESifo, IZA, and NBER); Woessmann, Ludger (University of Munich, ifo Institute, CESifo,IZA and CAGE) |
| Abstract: | School systems regularly use student assessments for accountability purposes. But, as highlighted by our conceptual model, different configurations of assessment usage generate performance-conducive incentives of different strengths for different stakeholders in different school environments. We build a dataset of over 2 million students in 59 countries observed over 6 waves in the international PISA student achievement test 2000-2015. Our empirical model exploits the country panel dimension to investigate reforms in assessment systems over time, where identification comes from taking out country and year fixed effects along with a rich set of student, school, and country measures. We find that the expansion of standardized external comparisons, both school-based and student-based, is associated with improvements in student achievement. The effect of school-based comparison is stronger in countries with initially low performance. Similarly, standardized monitoring without external comparison has a positive effect in initially poorly performing countries. By contrast, the introduction of solely internal testing and internal teacher monitoring including inspectorates does not affect student achievement. Our findings point out the pitfalls of overly broad generalizations from specific country testing systems. |
| Keywords: | student assessment, testing, accountability, student achievement, international, PISAJEL Classification: I28, H52, L15, D82, P51 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:392&r=all |
| By: | Jan Feld; Nicolás Salamanca; Ulf Zölitz |
| Abstract: | A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions—small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial groups. We find this to be largely not the case. Academic rank is unrelated to students’ current and future performance and only weakly positively related to students’ course evaluations. Building on these results, we discuss different staffing scenarios that show that universities can substantially reduce costs by increasingly relying on lower-ranked instructors for tutorial teaching. |
| Keywords: | student instructors, university, teacher value-added |
| JEL: | I21 I24 J24 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7380&r=all |
| By: | Ofer Malamud; Santiago Cueta; Julian Cristia; Diether W. Beuermann |
| Abstract: | This paper provides experimental evidence for the impact of home internet access on a broad range of child outcomes in Peru. We compare children who were randomly chosen to receive laptops with high-speed internet access to (i) those who did not receive laptops and (ii) those who only received laptops without internet. We find that providing free internet access led to improved computer and internet proficiency relative to those without laptops and improved internet proficiency compared to those with laptops only. However, there were no significant effects of internet access on math and reading achievement, cognitive skills, self-esteem, teacher perceptions, or school grades when compared to either group. We explore reasons for the absence of impacts on these key outcomes with survey questions, time-diaries, and computer logs. |
| Keywords: | internet, children, education, skills, experimental, Peru |
| JEL: | I21 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7384&r=all |