Abstract
AbstractThis article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are independent of underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we exploit naturally occurring differences in achievement distributions across primary school classes to estimate the impact of class rank. We find large effects on test scores, confidence, and subject choice during secondary school, even though these students have a new set of peers and teachers who are unaware of the students’ prior ranking in primary school. The effects are especially pronounced for boys, contributing to an observed gender gap in the number of Maths courses chosen at the end of secondary school. Using a basic model of student effort allocation across subjects, we distinguish between learning and non-cognitive skills mechanisms, finding support for the latter.
Highlights
It is human nature to make comparisons against one’s peers
To begin the discussion of the results we present estimates of the impact of primary school rank on age 14 test scores
Our findings would speak to why the potential benefits of prestigious schools may be attenuated through the development of negative self-concepts amongst these marginal/bussed students, who necessarily would be the low ranked students. This is consistent with Cullen, Jacob and Levitt (2006), who find that those whose peers improve the most gain the least: ‘lottery winners have substantially lower class ranks throughout high school as a result of attending schools with higher achieving peers and are more likely to drop out’
Summary
It is human nature to make comparisons against one’s peers. Individuals make comparisons in terms of characteristics, traits and abilities in tasks (Festinger, 1954). The paper goes on to examine the nature of these effects and finds that they exist throughout the rank distribution, implying that students accurately place themselves within their class, despite not being explicitly informed of their rank This is likely to occur due to the repeated interactions among peers throughout the six years of primary school as well as seating arrangements that that reflect rank positions in many English primary schools. Low-income students gain more from being top of the class but are less negatively affected by being ranked below the median Having presented this range of findings, the paper examines and tests threats to identification such as other forms of peer effects, measurement error and sorting to schools by parents. Combining our administrative data with survey data containing direct measures of subject-specific confidence, we show that those who ranked higher in primary school have larger measures of later confidence, conditional on relative test scores and student effects.
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