Cuba’s Academic Advantage


Book Description

The first in-depth analysis of how an entire educational system delivers higher student achievement.




Peer Effects in the Classroom


Book Description

Peer effects are potentially important for understanding the optimal organization of schools, jobs, and neighborhoods, but finding evidence is difficult because people are selected into peer groups based, in part, on their unobservable characteristics. I identify the effects of peers whom a child encounters in the classroom using sources of variation that are credibly idiosyncratic, such as changes in the gender and racial composition of a grade in a school in adjacent years. I use specification tests, including one based on randomizing the order of years, to confirm that the variation I use is not generated by time trends or other non-idiosyncratic forces. I find that students are affected by the achievement level of their peers: a credibly exogenous change of 1 point in peers' reading scores raises a student's own score between 0.15 and 0.4 points, depending on the specification. Although I find little evidence that peer effects are generally non-linear, I do find that peer effects are stronger intra-race and that some effects do not operate through peers' achievement. For instance, both males and females perform better in math in classrooms that are more female despite the fact that females' math performance is about the same as that of males




Handbook of the Economics of Education


Book Description

How does education affect economic and social outcomes, and how can it inform public policy?Volume 3 of the Handbooks in the Economics of Education uses newly available high quality data from around the world to address these and other core questions. With the help of new methodological approaches, contributors cover econometric methods and international test score data. They examine the determinants of educational outcomes and issues surrounding teacher salaries and licensure. And reflecting government demands for more evidence-based policies, they take new looks at institutional feaures of school systems. Volume editors Eric A. Hanushek (Stanford), Stephen Machin (University College London) and Ludger Woessmann (Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich) draw clear lines between newly emerging research on the economics of education and prior work. In conjunction with Volume 4, they measure our current understanding of educational acquisition and its economic and social effects. - Uses rich data to study issues of high contemporary policy relevance - Demonstrates how education serves as an important determinant of economic and social outcomes - Benefits from the globalization of research in the economics of education




Handbook of the Economics of Education


Book Description

The Handbooks in Economics series continues to provide the various branches of economics with handbooks which are definitive reference sources, suitable for use by professional researchers, advanced graduate students, or by those seeking a teaching supplement. With contributions from leading researchers, each Handbook presents an accurate, self-contained survey of the current state of the topic under examination. These surveys summarize the most recent discussions in journals, and elucidate new developments. Although original material is also included, the main aim of this series is the provision of comprehensive and accessible surveys. *Every volume contains contributions from leading researchers *Each Handbook presents an accurate, self-contained survey of a particular topic *The series provides comprehensive and accessible surveys




Ebook: Urban Economics


Book Description

Ebook: Urban Economics




Handbook of Social Economics


Book Description

How do economists understand and measure normal social phenomena? Identifying economic strains in activities such as learning, group formation, discrimination, and peer dynamics requires sophisticated data and tools as well as a grasp of prior scholarship. In this volume leading economists provide an authoritative summary of social choice economics, from norms and conventions to the exchange of discrete resources. Including both theoretical and empirical perspectives, their work provides the basis for models that can offer new insights in applied economic analyses. - Reviews the recent approaches that enable economists to separate influences of culture from those caused by economic and institutional environments - Explores the recent willingness among economists to consider new arguments in the utility function - Presumes that these investigations can eventually be translated into policies







Educational Assessment in Latin America


Book Description

This collection presents educational assessment research from Latin America, adding to a relatively small but growing body of research considering educational assessment and evaluation issues in this large region. The predominance of Chile reflects its early highly centralized education system, and the fact that it adopted national testing before other Latin American countries. It was also an early participant in international assessment programmes. Other countries have followed the trend of implementing national testing, and to a lesser extent participating in international surveys. The complementary development of technical expertise in quantitative research methods has enabled extensive analysis of the large data sets generated by these testing and assessment programmes. Taken together, the evidence reported provides a means not only of reviewing educational quality issues in Latin America, but also of facilitating comparisons that allow the context specificity of equivalent research conducted in western developed countries to be considered. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice.




Handbook of Social Economics


Book Description

How can economists define social preferences and interactions? Culture, familial beliefs, religion, and other sources contain the origins of social preferences. Those preferences--the desire for social status, for instance, or the disinclination to receive financial support--often accompany predictable economic outcomes. Through the use of new economic data and tools, our contributors survey an array of social interactions and decisions that typify homo economicus. Their work brings order to the sometimes conflicting claims that countries, environments, beliefs, and other influences make on our economic decisions. - Describes recent scholarship on social choice and introduces new evidence about social preferences - Advances our understanding about quantifying social interactions and the effects of culture - Summarizes research on theoretical and applied economic analyses of social preferences




Visible Learning


Book Description

This unique and ground-breaking book is the result of 15 years research and synthesises over 800 meta-analyses on the influences on achievement in school-aged students. It builds a story about the power of teachers, feedback, and a model of learning and understanding. The research involves many millions of students and represents the largest ever evidence based research into what actually works in schools to improve learning. Areas covered include the influence of the student, home, school, curricula, teacher, and teaching strategies. A model of teaching and learning is developed based on the notion of visible teaching and visible learning. A major message is that what works best for students is similar to what works best for teachers – an attention to setting challenging learning intentions, being clear about what success means, and an attention to learning strategies for developing conceptual understanding about what teachers and students know and understand. Although the current evidence based fad has turned into a debate about test scores, this book is about using evidence to build and defend a model of teaching and learning. A major contribution is a fascinating benchmark/dashboard for comparing many innovations in teaching and schools.