The good, the bad, and the average: Evidence of ability peer effects in schools
Click Here To Read: The good, the bad, and the average: Evidence of ability peer effects in schools
Summary (Via Voxeu)
Does it matter who you went to school with? This column presents evidence from England suggesting strong peer influence among secondary school classmates. But the effects vary with gender and ability. Girls significantly benefit from more interactions with very bright peers, whereas it can impair boys – especially those with higher ability.
Findings (via Voxeu)
The gender and ability differences that we document allow us to perform some interesting policy simulations. To begin with, suppose that our students were exposed to the following two treatments simultaneously: a reduction in the percentage of top 5% and bottom 5% new peers from 20% to 0%. This change can be viewed as a move towards a class of closer ability. This shift would unambiguously improve male students’ age-14 achievements by about 0.22 of a within-pupil standard deviation. This effect is not dissimilar for the most and least able boys, and is only slightly larger than the findings in Duflo et al. (2008) on Kenyan primary schools. On the other hand, our experiment would give more heterogeneous results for girls. On average, the shift would improve female students’ age-14 achievements by about 0.06 of a within-pupil standard deviation. But this overall effect would turn negative for girls in the bottom part of the ability distribution, who could lose out as much as 0.10 of a standard deviation. At the other extreme, the most talented girls could gain more than 0.20 of a standard deviation from being educated in homogeneous environments.
Another policy-relevant experiment is to simulate the effects of tracking by grouping all students – including the bottom 5% and top 5% – into two classes perfectly segregated along the lines of student’s ability. The first group would include pupils who are above the median of the ability distribution, and the second those below the median. This shift would unambiguously worsens students’ age-14 achievements in the low ability class, with a negative impact of about -0.03 of a standard deviation for boys, and -0.06 for girls. On the other hand, the changes experienced in the high ability group would improve boys’ age-14 achievements by at most 0.01, while girls would benefit by up to 0.06.
Do our results lend overall support to tracking of students by ability? Besides any equity consideration, there is no simple answer to this question from an efficiency-of-learning point of view. As we have just shown, our results are clearly heterogeneous in relation to a pupil’s ability and gender, and vary according to the exact details of the tracking-experiment being carried out.
Despite not giving a one-size-fit-all policy recommendation, we believe our findings are rich enough to provide a solid ground for insightful interventions targeting students’ ability mix as a means to improve learning standards.
Click Here To Read: The good, the bad, and the average: Evidence of ability peer effects in schools
