Equality of Educational Opportunity.

Since the assessment program began in 1997, over 70 countries have participated at least once. Every three years, a randomly selected group of 15-year-old students take the test, which primarily focuses on one key subject.

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Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

To the extent that students benefit from high-achieving peers, tracking will help strong students and hurt weak ones. However, all students may benefit if tracking allows teachers to present material at a more appropriate level. Lower-achieving pupils are particularly likely to benefit from tracking if teachers would otherwise have incentives to teach to the top of the distribution. We propose a simple model nesting these effects. We compare 61 Kenyan schools in which students were randomly assigned to a first grade class with 60 in which students were assigned based on initial achievement. In non-tracking schools, students randomly assigned to academically stronger peers scored higher, consistent with a positive direct effect of academically strong peers. However, compared to their counterparts in non-tracking schools, students in tracking schools scored 0.14 standard deviations higher after 18 months, and this effect persisted one year after the program ended. Furthermore, students at all levels of the distribution benefited from tracking. Students near the median of the pre-test distribution benefited similarly whether assigned to the lower or upper section. A natural interpretation is that the direct effect of high-achieving peers is positive, but that tracking benefited lower-achieving pupils indirectly by allowing teachers to teach at a level more appropriate to them.

Replication data for: Peer Effects, Teacher Incentives, and the Impact of Tracking: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Kenya

This review describes the research frontier on human capital and education in economics research. It delineates what is known and largely agreed, and what are the most promising lines for future research. The approach will be to explain clearly and precisely the research evidence, in a way that makes this accessible to a wide audience. The survey has two particular aims. First, it draws out the implications for key education policy issues, highlighting which policy ideas can be supported by the economics research. To do this, my focus is on research that identifies causal effects. Second, it tries to identify some of the big open research questions and policy knowledge gaps in this field.

Human Capital and Education: The State of the Art in the Economics of Education

We evaluate a tracking program in a large urban district where schools with at least one gifted fourth grader create a separate “gifted/high achiever” classroom. Most seats are filled by non-gifted high achievers, ranked by previous-year test scores. We study the program's effects on the high achievers using (i) a rank-based regres sion discontinuity design, and (ii) a between-school/cohort analysis. We find significant effects that are concentrated among black and Hispanic participants. Minorities gain 0.5 standard deviation units in fourth-grade reading and math scores, with persistent gains through sixth grade. We find no evidence of negative or positive spillovers on nonparticipants. (JEL I21, J21, J24)

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Can Tracking Raise the Test Scores of High-Ability Minority Students?.

Funding text: We acknowledge financial support from Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (UID/ECO/00124/2013, PTDC/ IIM-ECO/6813/2014 and Social Sciences Data Lab project 22209), POR Lisboa (LISBOA-01–0145-FEDER007722 and Social Sciences Data Lab project 22209) and POR Norte (Social Sciences Data Lab project 22209). We thank Direcao-Geral de Estatisticas da Educacao e Ciencia for providing the data. We are indebted to two anonymous reviewers that contributed to improve the paper

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Predictors of student success in Higher Education: secondary school internal scores versus national exams

The publication of school rankings: A step toward increased accountability?

The results of large-scale international assessments such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have attracted a considerable attention worldwide and are often used by policy-makers to support educational policies. To ensure that the published results represent the actual population, these surveys go through a thorough scrutiny to ensure their validity. One important issue that may affect the results is the occurrence of different participation rates across groups with heterogeneous average student scores. In this study, we illustrate how problems of representativeness of the samples may be corrected by the use of post-stratified weights. We use the case of Portugal, a country where we uncover a meaningful difference between the actual population and the PISA samples in terms of the distribution of students per grade and track of studies. We show that after post-stratification, the temporal evolution of the PISA scores is quite different from the one reported.

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Correcting for sample problems in PISA and the improvement in Portuguese students’ performance

In many countries, students are selected into higher education institutions based on their achievement at high school, measured by scores given by their teachers and obtained on final national exam

Student Selection and Performance in Higher Education: Admission Exams vs. High School Scores.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the investigation of the relative performance of private versus public schools. We take advantage of the co-existence in Portugal of strictly private, strictly public and state funded private schools to isolate the impact of different property and management schemes on the performance of students, resorting to cross-section data on the scores obtained on national exams by 9th grade students in 2010. The results corroborate the well-established result on the relevance of the family socio-economic background for students performance, but do also sustain the existence of a positive impact of private ownership on the scores of students. We also compare the number of years required to finish mandatory schooling in these three types of schools and conclude that the benefits of state funded versus strictly public schools are unclear: the probability of a student being retained at last once is slightly higher in state funded public schools but the probability of relapsing situations, failing twice the same grade, is lower.

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Carmo Seabra

Papers

Predictors of student success in Higher Education: secondary school internal scores versus national exams

The publication of school rankings: A step toward increased accountability?

Correcting for sample problems in PISA and the improvement in Portuguese students’ performance

Student Selection and Performance in Higher Education: Admission Exams vs. High School Scores.

Public and Private school management systems: A Comparative analysis