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Zearn study on extensive planning prompts

Educators and policymakers are facing growing disparities in academic achievement between high and low-income students, differences that appear to have increased as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. A promising cost-effective strategy to address this issue is the use of Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) technologies, which help students progress through topics at their own pace while receiving feedback and support. However, whether CAL interventions can be scaled up effectively remains a first-order question. Our project is a collaboration with the Puerto Rico Department of Education to experimentally evaluate the impact of a large-scale training and coaching program to support mathematics teachers to use Khan Academy, one of the most popular mathematics-oriented CAL educational platforms. The program will be gradually phased-in and offered at scale to the population of fourth to eighth grade Mathematics teachers in the system’s approximately 650 primary and middle schools. We will also test whether complementary technology-enabled behavioral interventions can promote its use via parental involvement. The study will examine the program’s impact on math achievement in elementary and secondary school classrooms, as well as student, teacher, and parent experiences with the program.

This research investigates the effectiveness of providing teachers with supports for integrating Khan Academy programming with their math instruction. The study will be conducted as a randomized control trial comparing math achievement of students whose teachers have been offered support from a Khan Academy “Khollaborator” to students whose teachers do not receive the Khollaborator support and conduct their math instruction as usual. Teachers in the treatment group will also receive regular progress reports and support for communicating with parents and students. Results will provide information about how to most effectively align Khan Academy with classroom efforts, and how doing so impacts students’ math achievement.

This article takes stock of where the field of behavioral science applied to education policy seems to be at, which avenues seem promising and which ones seem like dead ends. I present a curated set of studies rather than an exhaustive literature review, categorizing interventions by whether they nudge (keep options intact) or "shove" (restrict choice), and whether they apply a high or low touch (whether they use face-to-face interaction or not). Many recent attempts to test large-scale low touch nudges find precisely estimated null effects, suggesting we should not expect letters, text messages, and online exercises to serve as panaceas for addressing education policy's key challenges. Programs that impose more choice-limiting structure to a youth's routine, like mandated tutoring, or programs that nudge parents, appear more promising.

Many wonder whether teacher gender plays an important role in higher education by influencing student achievement and subject interest. The data used in this paper helps identify average effects from male and female university students assigned to male or female teachers. In contrast to previous work at the primary and secondary school level, our focus on large first-year undergraduate classes isolates gender interaction effects due to students reacting to instructors rather than instructors reacting to students. In addition, by focussing on university students, we examine the extent to which gender interactions may exist at later ages. We find that assignment to a same-sex instructor boosts relative grade performance and the likelihood of completing a course, but the magnitudes of these effects are small. A same-sex instructor increases average grade performance by at most 5 percent of its standard deviation and decreases the likelihood of dropping a course by 1.2 percentage points. The effects are similar when conditioning on initial ability (high school achievement), and ethnic background (mother tongue not English), but smaller when conditioning on mathematics and science courses. The effects of same-sex instructors on upper-year course selection are insignificant.

Dans un cadre ou la formation et les perspectives d'avancement dependent des previsions initiales de competence, les effets sur les salaires des signaux de competence initiale peuvent se manifester bien au-dela de la periode ou l'on connait bien les qualites d'un travailleur. Ce document propose d'etendre les analyses recentes de signaux pour mieux tenir compte des differences de formation en utilisant les caracteristiques des entreprises et en appliquant les criteres d'analyse a un grand echantillon de titulaires de maitrise en administration des affaires et de diplome en droit d'ecoles de rang divers.

Many economists and educators of diverse political beliefs favor public support for education on the premise that a more educated electorate enhances the quality of democracy. While some earlier studies document an association between schooling and citizenship, little attempt has been made to address the possibility that unobservable characteristics of citizens underlie this relationship. This paper explores the effect of extra schooling induced through compulsory schooling laws on the likelihood of becoming politically involved in the US and the UK. We find that educational attainment is related to several measures of political interest and involvement in both countries. For voter turnout, we find a strong and robust relationship between education and voting for the US, but not for the UK. Using the information on validated voting, we find that misreporting of voter status can not explain our estimates. Our results suggest that the observed drop in voter turnout in the US from 1964 to 2000 would have been 10.4 to 12.3 percentage points greater if high school attainment had stayed at 1964 rates, holding all else constant. However, when we condition on registration, our US results approach the UK findings. This may indicate that registration rules present a barrier to low-educated citizens' participation.

This paper examines whether long-run labour market outcomes depend on residential environment among adults who grew up in subsidized housing in Toronto. The housing program in Toronto provides a full spectrum of neighbourhood quality types to measure outcome differences, and offers a real-life example of large scale neighbourhood quality reform. A primary advantage with this approach is that, conditional on participation in public housing, residential choice is substantially limited. Families that applied for public housing could not specify which project they wished to be housed in and were constrained to what was offered based on availability at the time they applied and by family size. Unlike previous housing mobility experiments, the availability of administrative tax records are used to measure both short and long run outcomes. The results indicate almost no difference in educational attainment, adult earnings, income, and social assistance participation between children from different public housing types. Average outcomes, estimated wage distributions, and outcome correlations among unrelated project neighbours show no significant neighbourhood impact. In contrast, family differences seem to matter a great deal.

Mon propos sera d'examiner si les resultats obtenus a long terme sur le marche du travail dependent du milieu d'habitation des adultes qui ont grandi dans des logements subventionnes a Toronto. Le programme torontois de logement offre tout l'eventail de qualite des quartiers pour une mesure des differences de resultats. Il nous donne un exemple bien concret de reforme possible a grande echelle de la qualite des quartiers. Un grand avantage avec une telle optique est que, si on participe a un programme de logement public, on est grandement restreint dans le choix d'un logement. Les familles qui ont demande un logement public ne pouvaient indiquer dans quel ensemble elles auraient desire habiter et devaient se limiter a ce qui etait disponible au moment de leur demande selon le nombre de leurs membres. Contrairement a ce qui s'est fait dans les etudes anterieures de mobilite dans le domaine de l'habitation, nous nous reportons aux dossiers administratifs disponibles du fisc pour mesurer les resultats a court terme comme a long terme. Nos resultats ne font voir presque aucune difference d'instruction, de gains a l'age adulte, de revenu et de participation au regime d'aide sociale entre les enfants qui ont grandi dans des ensembles de logements publics differents. Pour les resultats moyens, les repartitions salariales estimatives et les correlations de resultats entre voisins non apparentes dans des ensembles, on ne peut discerner d'effet appreciable de quartier. En revanche, les differences de famille semblent beaucoup importer.