Criterion consistency in school effectiveness: Comparing the schooling effect on final achievement, the quality, and the equity dimensions

The Effect of One Extra Year of Schooling on PISA Results: A Case of Countries with Different Tracking Systems

ABSTRACTBackground: Recent effectiveness studies have investigated the relationship between two dimensions of effectiveness – namely, quality and equity. Specifically, the question of whether effective schools can also reduce the initial differences in student outcomes attributed to student background factors has been examined. In this context, the Dynamic Approach to School Improvement (DASI) makes use of theory and the research findings of effectiveness studies to try to improve school effectiveness in terms of quality and equity.Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether the implementation of DASI in primary schools in socially disadvantaged areas in four European countries (Cyprus, England, Greece and Ireland) was able to promote student learning outcomes in mathematics and to reduce the impact of student background factors on student achievement in mathematics.Design and methods: A sample of 72 primary schools across the four countries was randomly split into experimental and control groups. At the beginning and at the end of the school year, mathematics tests were administered to all students of Grades 4–6 (n = 5560; student ages 9–12 years). The experimental group made use of DASI. Within-country multilevel regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the impact of the intervention and search for interaction effects between the use of DASI and student background factors on final achievement.Results: In each country, the experimental group achieved better results in mathematics than the control group. At the beginning of the intervention, the achievement gap based on socio-economic status (SES) was equally large in the experimental and the control groups. Only in the experimental group did the achievement gap based on SES become smaller. However, DASI was not found to have an effect on equity when the equity dimension was examined by focusing on the achievement gap based on either gender or ethnicity.Conclusions: Implications of findings are drawn and the importance of measuring equity in terms of student achievement gaps based on different background factors, rather than only on SES, is emphasised. We propose the evaluation of the impact of interventions on promoting equity by the use of various criteria.

We relate differences in problem drinking symptoms within pairs of identical twins to their respective differences in years of schooling. Isolating in this way the influences of family background and genes, we find that an increase in schooling attainment results in a significantly lower incidence of problem drinking for men. Thus, an extra year of schooling reduces the number of health problems caused by drinking by 0.14, and the probability of developing symptoms of Alcohol Dependence (AD) by 0.06. This negative link is robust to a variety of modifications to the identifying assumptions underlying our statistical analysis. Socio-economic implications of our findings are discussed.

In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of an extra year of schooling on mathematics performance for seven Latin American countries based on PISA 2012. To that end we exploit exogenous variation in students’ birthdates around the school entry cut-off date using both sharp and fuzzy Regression Discontinuity designs. We find strong effects of an extra year of schooling in most countries, which amount to a 30% increase in PISA test scores in Brazil, 18% in Uruguay, 7% in Argentina and 6% in Costa Rica. These effects differ from the typical estimates obtained from simple regressions or multilevel models and are large enough to allow 15-year-old students to reach higher proficiency levels, suggesting significant potential gains of reducing dropout rates in the region. Finally, we stress the importance of taking into account the effects of school entry cut-off dates on PISA samples to avoid making unfair international comparisons.

Does Education Reduce the Risk of Hypertension? Estimating the Biomarker Effect of Compulsory Schooling in England

This paper estimates the exogenous effect of schooling on reduced incidence of hypertension. Using the changes in the minimum school-leaving age law in the United Kingdom from age 14 to 15 in 1947 and from age 15 to 16 in 1973 as sources of exogenous variation in schooling, the regression discontinuity and instrumental variable probit estimates imply that, for the first law change in 1947, completing an extra year of schooling reduces the probability of developing subsequent hypertension by approximately 7–10 percentage points. No significant effect was found for the introduction of the second law change in 1973.

Investment in womens education possibly has a greater return than investing in areas such as power generation. Education is an economic issue. When the self-fulfilling prophecy of girls lack of education yielding lower economic worth is compared with the self-fulfilling prophecy of educated women having healthy children and greater earning ability there is no doubt which scenario is more beneficial to the individual and society. Wages of educated female workers rise by 20% and personal hygiene and public health improvements contribute to lower fertility and infant mortality. In Pakistan educating an additional 1000 girls/year would cost $40000 in 1990 prices. Each year of schooling would reduce the under-5 year child mortality rate by 10%. 1000 women with an extra year of schooling would prevent 60 infant deaths which if prevented through health care interventions would cost an estimated $48000. Female fertility would be reduced by about 10% for an extra year of schooling and thus would avert 660 births or a saving $43000. Social improvement alone is worth the extra cost. Investing in female education means establishing scholarship funds providing more free books and other supplies adapting curricula to cultural and practical concerns and hiring female teachers. Increasing female primary school enrollment to equal boys enrollment in low income countries would mean educating an extra 25 million girls every/year at a total cost of about $938 million. Equalizing secondary school enrollment would entail educating an extra 21 million girls at a cost of $1.4 billion. The total cost of $2.4 billion constitutes less than .25% of the gross domestic product of low income countries less than 1% of investment in new capital goods and less than 10% of defense spending. Investment statistics on power plants in a sample of 57 developing countries showed a return on physical plant assets of less than 4% over the past 3 years and less than 6% over the past 10 years. Return was low because of maintenance and pricing problems; the expectation is that efficiency will be improved. The point is still germane that the return on investment of female education is high and that taking the savings from building 19 out of 20 planned power plants and financing equal education opportunity for girls is desirable.

Purpose – Identification of factors determining the effectiveness of public schools’ management, and the establishment of means for developing the concept of measuring the schools’ effectiveness. Methodology – Review and assessment of concepts and studies present in Polish and international literature pertaining to the evaluation of public schools’ effectiveness. Findings – The hitherto methods for evaluating schools are unsatisfactory. It is largely associated with ambiguous definitions of schools’ effectiveness and identification of objectives and tasks schools are to achieve and undertake, associated with it. This, in turn, results from the fact that effectiveness assessment may by defined differently by various stakeholders. However, the measurement of effectiveness is necessary due to the fact that it facilitates the emergence of high quality educational services in Polish public schools. Research implications – The review of literature indicates that the assessment of educational added value over the course of several years of education seems valid. This means that rather than tracking final results achieved by students, the growth of students’ knowledge ought to be measured. The Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method may be helpful in relation to the above. The method seems well-suited for evaluating the effectiveness of NGO sector institutions, and takes non-financial factors into consideration, which will enable methodologically categorized knowledge on the effectiveness of schools’ management to be obtained. Practical implications – Results of the present study may be applied by institutions supervising public schools and by individuals who manage these institutions in order to perform periodic assessments of schools’ effectiveness, and who would stimulate the education quality improvement. Social implications – Results of the present study may foster the improvement of schools’ competitiveness and improvement of their educational actions’ quality. Originality/ Value – The paper supplements knowledge regarding the assessment of Polish public schools’ effectiveness. Type of article – A theoretical paper.

The current research investigated the variability of school effects on intelligence development in considering two economically and socially distinct groups of children. The data came from a nationally representative sample of primary school children from urban and rural areas of China. Two standardised reasoning tests were used to assess fluid intelligence. The between-grade regression discontinuity approach was applied to disentangle the schooling effect from the age effect. Results showed that the combined effects of schooling and age were 5.09 intelligence points per year, in which the schooling effect (4.37 points) was larger than the age effect (.72 points). The patterns of schooling and age effects were different in urban and rural subsamples. For the urban subsample, the schooling effect was smaller than the age effect for children from grade 1 to 3, but the schooling effect became larger than the age effect from grade 4 to 6. For the rural subsample, however, the schooling effect was always larger than the age effect. The effect of one year of schooling for rural children (5.59 points) was larger than that for urban children (3.15 points). These results suggest that schooling effects are closely related to the context where children are growing up.

This paper reviews educational effectiveness theory, concentrating on the time stability of the teacher and school effect. The contribution of longitudinal studies investigating the long‐term effect of schools and teachers to modelling educational effectiveness is discussed. Findings of a longitudinal study on the progress of students (N=1681) in mathematics during their first four years at the primary school are presented. Results of this study reveal that traditional approaches of measuring educational effectiveness tend to overestimate the short‐term effects of teachers and student background factors and underestimate the long‐term effects of teachers and schools. Implications of findings for the theory of educational effectiveness and especially for the concepts of teacher and school effects and their stability are drawn. Finally, suggestions for establishing evaluation mechanisms to improve practice are provided.

This paper looks at the effect schooling has had on household welfare in Sri Lanka during the 1990–2006 period, on average and across the welfare distribution. We account for the endogeneity of schooling using quantile instrumental variable estimation as developed in Chernozhukov, Fernández‐Val, and Kowalski (). We use pooled data from four cross‐sectional Household Income Expenditure Surveys. The results show that an extra year of schooling on the part of the most educated adult member in the household can increase welfare (proxied by real per capita consumption expenditure) by 3.8 percent on average. However, the effect varies considerably across the welfare distribution: At the lower end, around the 20th and 25th quantiles, an extra year of education increases welfare by 6 and 5 percent, respectively, while at the median it is around 3.5 percent. At the higher, 90th quantile it is much less, at 1 percent. Thus the marginal effect of schooling on welfare is significant and positive at all levels of the welfare distribution, but highest at the lower and middle quartiles. This result is different from findings in the literature that tend to show larger effects at higher quantiles, when endogeneity is uncorrected.

The PISA 2009 data (in reading) investigated the effectiveness of one year of schooling in seven countries: Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, Canada, and Brazil. We used an instrumental variable, which allowed us to estimate the effect of one year of schooling through the fuzzy method of regression discontinuity. The analysis was performed both for regular and vocational education programs collectively as well as individually for regular schools. It was found that in general for Russian students enrolled in all programs, the effectiveness of one year of schooling is insignificant. In countries that practice the early separation of students into regular and vocational programs, the effectiveness of schooling is lower than in countries where all fifteen-year-olds are enrolled in regular programs. The effectiveness of one year of schooling for students enrolled in regular educational programs is significant in all countries. Students enrolled in vocational programs typically perform more poorly than those enrolled in regular programs. The strength of the relationship between the socioeconomic status of the student's family and the effectiveness of schooling are highly dependent on the education system and vary from country to country. For Russia, as well as for some other countries, the effectiveness of schooling does not depend on socioeconomic status. The significance of these results for the evaluation of the effectiveness of schooling, and in particular for the fair evaluation of national achievement in countries that offer different educational trajectories, is discussed.

We investigate why macro‐Mincer models have been unable to identify a positive longitudinal effect of schooling on GDP over short periods. We first determine that the best Mincer model of workers’ cross‐sectional earnings includes two schooling‐experience interactions and no independent effect of experience. In the results for this model, about half of the effect of additional schooling occurred in the initial five‐year period and the remaining effect was delayed up to 40 years. We then show that this same lagged pattern successfully explains the effect of schooling on GDP in 98 countries over five‐year intervals during 1975‐2005. Over this period an additional year of schooling raised GDP by 5.8% on average, but by less initially due to the interaction effect with experience. The effects on GDP were consistent with the cumulative effects of schooling on workers’ earnings. We conclude that average years of schooling is an inaccurate measure of a country’s human capital unless the interactive effect with experience is taken into account.

When the societies are worried about their educative process and they consider get it better, they are planning the progress in all their dimensions. There is the importance to set up politics that tend to have a high quality education. Nevertheless, the efforts in the Soledad township are not enough. In the development plan SOLEDAD CONFIABLE 2016-2019, the community indicated as a main problem the low quality education in the township. That is reflected in the performance levels measured by the ISCE. Hence, the investigation ́s objective is to analyze the continuous improvement processes of the educative quality in the successful schools of Soledad township. In other matters, this investigation used the paradigm quali- quantitative with a descriptive design to explain the academic process and the description of the factors that have influenced on this continuous process. With the help of four tools: documentary review rubric, semi-structured interview script and two questionnaires; it was achieved determine the specific practices that are using the principals and teachers to support the improvement of learnings and the integral development of the students.

From Classroom to Wedding Aisle: The Effect of a Nationwide Change in the Compulsory Schooling Law on Age at First Marriage in the UK