Economics Of Discrimination

With the increasing use of technology in education, online learning has become a common teaching method. How effective online learning is for undergraduate medical education remains unknown. This article's aim is to evaluate whether online learning when compared to offline learning can improve learning outcomes of undergraduate medical students. Five databases and four key journals of medical education were searched using 10 terms and their Boolean combinations during 2000-2017. The extracted articles on undergraduates' knowledge and skill outcomes were synthesized using a random effects model for the meta-analysis.16 out of 3,700 published articles were identified. The meta-analyses affirmed a statistically significant difference between online and offline learning for knowledge and skill outcomes based on post-test scores (SMD = 0.81; 95% CI: 0.43, 1.20; p < 0.0001; n = 15). The only comparison result based on retention test scores was also statistically significant (SMD = 4.64; 95% CI: 3.19, 6.09; p < 0.00001). The meta-analyses discovered no significant difference when using pre- and post-test score gains (SMD = 3.03; 95% CI: -0.13, 4.13; p = 0.07; n = 3). There is no evidence that offline learning works better. And compared to offline learning, online learning has advantages to enhance undergraduates' knowledge and skills, therefore, can be considered as a potential method in undergraduate medical teaching.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10872981.2019.1666538

Does online learning work better than offline learning in undergraduate medical education? A systematic review and meta-analysis

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Douglas S. Massey , Nancy A. Denton

We construct a public atlas of children's outcomes in adulthood by the Census tract in which they grew up using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimate children's earnings distributions, incarceration rates, and other out-comes in adulthood by parental income, race, and gender. Children's outcomes vary sharply across nearby areas: for children with parents at the 25th percentile of the national income distribution, the standard deviation of mean household income at age 35 is $5,000 across tracts within counties. We illustrate how the tract-level data provide insight into how neighborhoods shape the development of human capital and support local economic policy using two applications. First, we show how these data can be used to better target policies to improve economic opportunity by uncovering specific neighborhoods where certain subgroups of children grow up to have poor outcomes. Neighborhoods matter at a very granular level: conditional on characteristics such as poverty rates in a child's own Census tract, characteristics of tracts that are one mile away have little predictive power for a child's outcomes. Second, we show that the observational estimates are highly predictive of neighborhoods' causal effects, based on a comparison to data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment and a quasi-experimental research design analyzing movers' outcomes. We then identify high-opportunity neighborhoods that are affordable to low-income families, information that can be used to design affordable housing policies. Our measures of children's long-term outcomes are only weakly correlated with traditional proxies for local economic success such as rates of job growth, showing that the conditions that create greater upward mobility are not necessarily the same as those that lead to productive labor markets.

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The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility

A substantial amount of money is spent on technology by schools, families, and policymakers with the hope of improving educational outcomes. This chapter explores the theoretical and empirical literature on the impacts of technology on educational outcomes. The literature focuses on two primary contexts in which technology may be used for educational purposes: (i) classroom use in schools and (ii) home use by students. Theoretically, information and communications technology (ICT) investment and computer-aided instruction (CAI) use by schools and the use of computers at home have ambiguous implications for educational achievement: expenditures devoted to technology necessarily offset inputs that may be more or less efficient, and time allocated to using technology may displace traditional classroom instruction and educational activities at home. However, much of the evidence in the schooling literature is based on interventions that provide supplemental funding for technology or additional class time, and thus favor finding positive effects. Nonetheless, studies of ICT and CAI in schools produce mixed evidence with a pattern of null results. Notable exceptions to this pattern occur in studies of developing countries and CAI interventions that target math rather than language. In the context of home use, early studies based on multivariate and instrumental variables approaches tend to find large positive (and in a few cases negative) effects while recent studies based on randomized control experiments tend to find small or null effects. Early research focused on developed countries while more recently several experiments have been conducted in developing countries.

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Technology and Education: Computers, Software, and the Internet

Online college courses are a rapidly expanding feature of higher education, yet little research identifies their effects relative to traditional in-person classes. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that taking a course online, instead of in-person, reduces student success and progress in college. Grades are lower both for the course taken online and in future courses. Students are less likely to remain enrolled at the university. These estimates are local average treatment effects for students with access to both online and in-person options; for other students, online classes may be the only option for accessing college-level courses.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20151193

Virtual Classrooms: How Online College Courses Affect Student Success

Residential segregation, by definition, leads to racial and socioeconomic disparities in neighborhood conditions. These disparities may in turn produce inequality in social and economic opportunities and outcomes. Because racial and socioeconomic segregation are not independent of each other, however, any analysis of their causes, patterns, and effects must rest on an understanding of the joint distribution of race/ethnicity and income among neighborhoods. In this article, we use a new technique to describe the average racial composition and income distributions in the neighborhoods of households with different income levels and race/ethnicity. Using data from the decennial censuses and the American Community Survey, we investigate how patterns of neighborhood context in the United States over the past two decades vary by household race/ethnicity, income, and metropolitan area. We find large and persistent racial differences in neighborhood context, even among households with the same annual income.

Neighborhood Income Composition by Household Race and Income, 1990–2009:

Districts, states, and researchers are using value-added models with increasing frequency to evaluate educational policies and programs, as well as teachers and other educators individually. Despit...

/pdf/is-a-good-teacher-a-good-teacher-for-all-comparing-value-2ckpomck29.pdf

Is a Good Teacher a Good Teacher for All? Comparing Value-Added of Teachers With Their English Learners and Non-English Learners

Online college courses are a rapidly expanding feature of higher education, yet little research identifies their effects. Using an instrumental variables approach and data from DeVry University, this study finds that, on average, online course-taking reduces student learning by one-third to one-quarter of a standard deviation compared to conventional in-person classes. Taking a course online also reduces student learning in future courses and persistence in college. Additionally, we find that student performance is more variable online than in traditional classrooms but that individual professors explain less of the variation in student performance in online settings than in traditional classrooms. Total word count: 6,772

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Changing Distributions: How Online College Classes Alter Student and Professor Performance. CEPA Working Paper No. 15-10.

I present new evidence on the effects of having a same-sex or same-race teacher on two salient outcomes: teacher expectations for postsecondary attainment and teacher recommendations for advanced c...

/pdf/seeing-potential-the-effects-of-student-teacher-demographic-52qarhdppj.pdf

Lindsay Fox

Papers

Virtual Classrooms: How Online College Courses Affect Student Success

Neighborhood Income Composition by Household Race and Income, 1990–2009:

Is a Good Teacher a Good Teacher for All? Comparing Value-Added of Teachers With Their English Learners and Non-English Learners

Changing Distributions: How Online College Classes Alter Student and Professor Performance. CEPA Working Paper No. 15-10.

Seeing Potential: The Effects of Student–Teacher Demographic Congruence on Teacher Expectations and Recommendations