Instructive
Forward-Thinking Teens: The Effects of College Costs on Adolescent Risky Behavior
Benjamin Cowan
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the effect of college costs on teenagers' engagement in risky behaviors before they are old enough to attend college. Individuals with brighter prospects for future schooling attainment may engage in less drug and alcohol use and risky sexual activity because they have more to lose if such behaviors have harmful effects in their lives. If teens correctly predict that higher college costs make future college enrollment less likely, then adolescents facing different expected costs may choose different levels of risky behavior. I find that lower college costs in teenagers' states of residence raise their subjective expectations regarding college attendance and deter teenage substance use and sexual partnership. Specifically, a $1,000 reduction in tuition and fees at two-year colleges in a youth's state of residence (roughly a 50% difference at the mean) is associated with a decline in the number of sexual partners the youth had in the past year (by 26%), the number of days in the past month the youth smoked (by 14%), and the number of days in the past month the youth used marijuana (by 23%). These findings suggest that the often-studied correlation between schooling and health habits emerges in adolescence because teenagers with brighter college prospects curb their risky behavior in accordance with their expectations. The results also imply that policies that improve teenagers' educational prospects may be effective tools for reducing youthful involvement in such behaviors.
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Eva Pomerantz et al.
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examined American and Chinese children's sense of responsibility to their parents during early adolescence, with a focus on its implications for children's academic functioning. Four times over the seventh and eighth grades, 825 children (mean age = 12.73 years) in the United States and China reported on their sense of responsibility to their parents. Information on children's academic functioning was also collected from children as well as school records. Although children's sense of responsibility to their parents declined over the seventh and eighth grades in the United States, this was not the case in China. In both countries, children's sense of responsibility was predictive of enhanced academic functioning among children over time.
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The Flynn effect in Korea: Large gains
Jan te Nijenhuis et al.
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Secular gains in IQ test scores have been reported for many Western countries. This is the first study of secular IQ gains in South Korea, using various datasets. The first question is what the size of the Flynn effect in South Korea is. The gains per decade are 7.7 points for persons born between 1970 and 1990. These gains on broad intelligence batteries are much larger than the gains in Western countries of about 3 IQ points per decade. The second question is whether the Korean IQ gains are comparable to the Japanese IQ gains with a lag of a few decades. The gains in Japan of 7.7 IQ points per decade for those born approximately 1940-1965 are identical to the gains per decade for Koreans born 1970-1990. The third question is whether the Korean gains in height and education lag a few decades behind the Japanese gains. The Koreans reach the educational levels the Japanese reached 25-30 years before, and the gains in height for Koreans born 1970-1990 are very similar to gains in height for Japanese born 1940-1960, so three decades earlier. These findings combined strongly support the hypothesis of similar developmental patterns in the two countries.
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Are we wasting our children's time by giving them more homework?
Ozkan Eren & Daniel Henderson
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and history are shown to have little to no impact on their respective test scores.
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Yongyun Shin & Stephen Raudenbush
Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, April 2011, Pages 154-185
Abstract:
This article addresses three questions: Does reduced class size cause higher academic achievement in reading, mathematics, listening, and word recognition skills? If it does, how large are these effects? Does the magnitude of such effects vary significantly across schools? The authors analyze data from Tennessee's Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio study (STAR) of 1985, where students and teachers are randomly assigned to a small or regular class. The authors propose a three-level multivariate simultaneous equation model with an instrumental variable (IV) and estimation via maximum likelihood (ML) to analyze the data under an assumption of data missing at random (MAR). The IV, random assignment of students to a small or regular class, reduces class size which, by hypothesis, improves academic achievement in these domains. The authors extend Rubin's Causal Model (RCM) by involving a modified Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA), requiring no interference between classrooms and intact schools. The method accommodates data with a general missing pattern and extracts full information for analysis from the STAR data. The authors investigate both homogenous and heterogenous causal effects of class size on academic achievement scores across schools. The results show that reducing class size improves reading, mathematics, listening, and word recognition test scores from kindergarten to third grade, although the effects appear relatively small in second grade. The authors find no evidence that the causal effects vary across schools.
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Katrina Walsemann, Bethany Bell & Debeshi Maitra
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
Schools are one of the strongest socializing forces in the U.S. and wield considerable influence over individuals' social and economic trajectories. Our study investigates how school-level racial composition, measured by the percentage non-Hispanic white students in a school, affects depressive and somatic symptoms among a representative sample of U.S. adolescents, and whether the association differs by race/ethnicity. We analyzed Wave I data from the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, resulting in a sample size of 18,419 students attending 132 junior and senior high schools in 1994/5. After controlling for individual and school characteristics, our multilevel analyses indicated that with increasing percentages of white students at their school, black students experienced more depressive symptoms and a higher risk of reporting high levels of somatic symptoms. After including students' perceptions of discrimination and school attachment, the interaction between black student race and school-level racial composition was no longer significant for either outcome. Our findings suggest that attending predominately-minority schools may buffer black students from discrimination and increase their school attachment, which may reduce their risk of experiencing depressive and somatic symptoms.
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College Selectivity and Young Adult Health Behaviors
Jason Fletcher & David Frisvold
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Large literatures have shown important links between the quantity of completed education and health outcomes on one hand and the quality or selectivity of schooling on a host of adult outcomes, such as wages, on the other hand. However, little research attempts to produce evidence of the link between school quality and health. The paper presents the first evidence in the literature on the potential short and intermediate term effects of attending a selective college on health behaviors during and following college attendance. Using a variety of empirical methods, this paper shows strong evidence that college selectivity reduces tobacco and marijuana use but has small and possibly positive effects on binge drinking. The effects on weight behaviors are suggestive of reduced weight, potentially through diet but not exercise change.
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Does Intercollegiate Athletics Draw Local Students to a University?
Stephen Perez
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article presents evidence showing that success in football and men's basketball at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I level positively affects enrollment of local high school graduates at a college or university. Panel regressions for eight California State Universities (CSUs) from 1986 to 2009 show that one win in football can increase the percentage of local high school graduates entering the local CSUs by 0.051 percentage points and one win against a Division I basketball team results in an increase of 0.018 percentage points.
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Duhita Mahatmya & Brenda Lohman
Children and Youth Services Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research suggests an important link between maternal welfare and employment, lack of after-school care, and a child's propensity to engage in increased levels of delinquency. Indeed, with welfare reform, many disadvantaged families, typically single-mother households, face increased pressures to move off of welfare and into employment or risk losing their benefits, which decreases the mother's ability to provide adequate after-school care and supervision. Using longitudinal data from Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study, this study assessed how changes in maternal welfare and employment status, as well as participation in after-school activities influence rates of adolescents' delinquency four years later. Results show that early and increased participation in after-school activities served as a protective factor against late adolescent delinquency during a mother's transition off of welfare. Youth who increased their after-school activity participation from early to late adolescence had lower rates of delinquency at Wave 3. Policy implications are discussed.
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Michael Lovenheim & Lockwood Reynolds
Journal of Human Capital, Spring 2011, Pages 70-109
Abstract:
We characterize changes over time in the choices high school graduates make concerning 2-year attendance, 4-year attendance, and college nonattendance across the joint income and ability distribution. We find that college nonattendance decreased substantially between cohorts for both men and women and that these declines were larger for higher-ability students. On the 2-year/4-year margin, there is evidence of growing ability constraints among women. Furthermore, income has become more important among higher-ability men, and increases in 2-year attendance among high-ability but low-income men come at the expense of 4-year college enrollment. State-level college costs explain little of the changes we document.
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Robert Daniel Vorona et al.
Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 15 April 2011, Pages 145-151
Study Objectives: Early high school start times may contribute to insufficient sleep leading to increased teen crash rate. Virginia Beach (VB) and Chesapeake are adjacent, demographically similar cities. VB high schools start 75-80 minutes earlier than Chesapeake's. We hypothesized that VB teens would manifest a higher crash rate than Chesapeake teens.
Methods: The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) provided de-identified, aggregate 2008 and 2007 data for weekday crashes and crash times in VB and Chesapeake for drivers aged 16-18 years ("teens"), and provided 2008 and 2007 crash data for all drivers. Data allowed comparisons of VB versus Chesapeake crash rates for teens (overall and hour-by-hour), and teens versus all other ages. We compared AM and PM traffic congestion (peak hours) in the two cities.
Results: In 2008, there were 12,916 and 8,459 Virginia Beach and Chesapeake 16- to 18-year-old drivers, respectively. For VB and Chesapeake, teen drivers' crash rates in 2008 were 65.8/1000 and 46.6/1000 (p < 0.001), respectively, and in 2007 were 71.2/1000 and 55.6/1000. Teen drivers' crash peaks in the morning occurred one hour earlier in VB than Chesapeake, consistent with school commute time. Congestion data for VB and Chesapeake did not explain the different crash rates.
Conclusions: A significantly increased teen crash rate for both 2008 and 2007 occurred in VB, the city with earlier high school start times. Future studies using individual level data may clarify if sleep restriction, circadian dyssynchrony, and sleep inertia might contribute to this increased crash rate.
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Staying on Course: The Effects of Savings and Assets on the College Progress of Young Adults
William Elliott & Sondra Beverly
American Journal of Education, May 2011, Pages 343-374
Abstract:
Increasingly, college graduation is seen as a necessary step toward achieving the American Dream. However, large disparities exist in graduation rates. For many families, the current family income is not enough to finance college. Therefore, many young adults have to rely on education loans, which may be difficult to repay, leaving them strapped with debt after leaving college. This study examines the potential role of assets and savings for promoting college progress among young adults. Overall, findings suggest that policies, such as Child Development Accounts (CDAs), that help parents and youth accumulate savings - especially savings for college - may increase college attendance and graduation completion rates.
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Molly Sherlock
Public Finance Review, May 2011, Pages 331-364
Abstract:
This article explores the impact of changes in financial resources on student performance under Vermont's Equal Education Opportunity Act (Act 60). Under Act 60, per-pupil resources changed from year to year for many Vermont towns. This article asks whether these changes in resources were associated with changes in student performance as measured by pass rates on standardized tests. Using annual data on spending at pass rates, fixed effects and instrumental variables estimation techniques are employed. Changes in town spending under Vermont's Act 60 may have had a positive impact on fourth-grade math pass rates. However, these spending changes did not significantly affect reading or writing pass rates. There is suggestive, but inconclusive, evidence that additional resources were more effective at increasing test score pass rates in initially low-spending schools. There is not, however, any evidence that money was more effective in schools that were initially low achieving.
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Can Districts Keep Good Teachers in the Schools that Need them Most?
Cassandra Guarino, Abigail Brown & Adam Wyse
Economics of Education Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study investigates how school demographics and their interactions with policies affect the mobility behaviors of public school teachers with various human capital characteristics. Using data from North Carolina from 1995-2006, it finds that teachers' career stage and human capital investments dominate their decisions to leave public school teaching and school demographic characteristics play a dominant role in intra-system sorting. Schools serving at-risk children struggle to attract and retain teachers with desirable observable characteristics. We find evidence to suggest that across-the-board school-based pay-for-performance policies have small but significant associations with mobility decisions and appear to exacerbate inequities in the distribution of teacher qualifications.
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Working the Crevices: Granting Students Authority in Authoritarian Schools
Joan Goodman et al.
American Journal of Education, May 2011, Pages 375-398
Abstract:
Schools are beset with a serious "alienation gap" between teachers and students that is no less a problem than the "achievement gap." Increasing student voice is thought to be one means to fill the gap, for it activates agency and thereby decreases passivity. The extent of agency ranges from attentive adult listening to strong student leadership. Here we concentrate on distinguishing elements of freedom, power, and authority in the enactment of agency, particularly how these elements can be distributed to students in urban authoritarian schools. In this article, four second-year Teach for America graduate students describe and reflect on their separate initiatives. Following the descriptions, the senior author, in a cross-case analysis, suggests factors associated with successful outcomes - enhanced self-esteem, individual rather than collective pride, careful consideration of the external context, constrained objectives, and the transfer of authority rather than power. We conclude that in troubled, impoverished schools, incremental change in distributing genuine authority is a promising possibility for enhancing school attachment.
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Bridget Dever & Stuart Karabenick
School Psychology Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the effects of the two facets of authoritative teaching - high academic press and caring for students - on student interest and achievement in mathematics for middle and high school students (N = 3,602 in 198 classrooms), and whether those effects are moderated by students' ethnicity (Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Caucasian Non-Hispanic). Tested with hierarchical modeling, a trend suggested that the authoritative teaching style predicted higher levels of interest for Hispanic students; however, the trend for caring was approaching significance, which suggests that future research should be conducted to determine whether authoritative and authoritarian teaching styles truly have different effects on interest for this group. Authoritarian teaching (high press and low caring) was positively related to interest for Vietnamese students. Results for Caucasian students did not differ from Hispanic students, but should be interpreted with caution due to small sample size. For all students, authoritarian teaching was positively associated with achievement gains. Results are discussed in terms of the relationships between teaching style and different academic outcomes among particular student groups, as informed by the parenting style and teaching style literatures.
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Did PRWORA's mandatory school attendance policy increase attendance among targeted teenage girls?
Jeounghee Kim & Myungkook Joo
Children and Youth Services Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper was to examine if the school-attendance requirement of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) significantly increased attendance among the teenage girls that the policy targeted. This study applied difference-in-difference and difference-in-difference-in-difference methods to 12 years of cross-sectional data from the October Supplement of the Current Population Survey while isolating the effects of PRWORA from the effects of other factors that might have influenced the target population's school attendance. The findings indicated that PRWORA, overall, did not have significant positive impacts on school attendance; rather, the policy was associated with a small but significant reduction in school attendance of U.S.-born disadvantaged teenage girls between 1996 through 1999 and essentially no effects on the target population thereafter.