Movin' It and Improvin' It!: Using Both Education Strategies to Increase Teaching Effectiveness

Calls for reforms that use evaluations not only to recruit, retain, and dismiss teachers but also to enhance effectiveness through professional development. Recommends investing in proven professional development models and ensuring feedback is valuable

Evaluating Students' Evaluations of Professors

This paper contrasts measures of teacher effectiveness with the students' evaluations for the same teachers using administrative data from Bocconi University (Italy). The effectiveness measures are estimated by comparing the subsequent performance in follow-on coursework of students who are randomly assigned to teachers in each of their compulsory courses. We find that, even in a setting where the syllabuses are fixed and all teachers in the same course present exactly the same material, teachers still matter substantially. The average difference in subsequent performance between students who were assigned to the best and worst teacher (on the effectiveness scale) is approximately 43% of a standard deviation in the distribution of exam grades, corresponding to about 5.6% of the average grade. Additionally, we find that our measure of teacher effectiveness is negatively correlated with the students' evaluations: in other words, teachers who are associated with better subsequent performance receive worst evaluations from their students. We rationalize these results with a simple model where teachers can either engage in real teaching or in teaching-to-the-test, the former requiring higher students’ effort than the latter. Teaching-to-the-test guarantees high grades in the current course but does not improve future outcomes. Hence, if students are myopic and evaluate better teachers from which they derive higher utility in a static framework, the model is capable of predicting our empirical finding that good teachers receive bad evaluations, especially when teaching-to-the-test is very effective (for example, with multiple choice tests). Consistently with the predictions of the model, we also find that classes in which high skill students are over-represented produce evaluations that are less at odds with estimated teacher effectiveness.teacher quality, postsecondary education

The Effectiveness of Training for Displaced Workers with Long Prior Job Tenure

Workers displaced from long-tenure jobs often have difficulty finding new employment and can take a substantial drop in earnings when they find reemployment. These losses are large and persistent, and can easily dwarf the transitory losses from the initial period of nonemployment. Policy response for these long-term problems has centred on education, training and skill development. This paper surveys and assesses a variety of strategies that have been employed to determine training effectiveness, using results from field experiments and from econometric work based on non-experimental data. Findings from this large research enterprise are not encouraging. Both experimental and non-experimental research shows that the returns to training for displaced workers are low, almost surely less than the (well-estimated) returns to formal schooling which lie in the 6-9% range. On a cost-benefit basis, the body of evidence does not show that training pays off for most of the displaced population. Alternative means to compensate the losers from economic adjustment might include modified or expanded EI coverage, without any necessary link to training expenditures, and perhaps consideration of alternative policies, such as Wage Insurance. Since evidence on training programs for displaced workers gives only limited promise, it is important to search for other creative ways to ensure that the costs of economic restructuring do not fall disproportionately on a narrow group.labour market adjustment, training, displaced workers

The Credibility Revolution in Empirical Economics: How Better Research Design Is Taking the Con out of Econometrics

This essay reviews progress in empirical economics since Leamer's (1983) critique. Leamer highlighted the benefits of sensitivity analysis, a procedure in which researchers show how their results change with changes in specification or functional form. Sensitivity analysis has had a salutary but not a revolutionary effect on econometric practice. As we see it, the credibility revolution in empirical work can be traced to the rise of a design-based approach that emphasizes the identification of causal effects. Design-based studies typically feature either real or natural experiments and are distinguished by their prima facie credibility and by the attention investigators devote to making the case for a causal interpretation of the findings their designs generate. Design-based studies are most often found in the microeconomic fields of Development, Education, Environment, Labor, Health, and Public Finance, but are still rare in Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics. We explain why IO and Macro would do well to embrace a design-based approach. Finally, we respond to the charge that the design-based revolution has overreached.research design, natural experiments, structural models, quasi-experiments

Exploiting Game Theory for Analysing Justifications

Justification theory is a unifying semantic framework. While it has its roots in non-monotonic logics, it can be applied to various areas in computer science, especially in explainable reasoning; its most central concept is a justification: an explanation why a property holds (or does not hold) in a model. In this paper, we continue the study of justification theory by means of three major contributions. The first is studying the relation between justification theory and game theory. We show that justification frameworks can be seen as a special type of games. The established connection provides the theoretical foundations for our next two contributions. The second contribution is studying under which condition two different dialects of justification theory (graphs as explanations vs trees as explanations) coincide. The third contribution is establishing a precise criterion of when a semantics induced by justification theory yields consistent results. In the past proving that such semantics were consistent took cumbersome and elaborate proofs. We show that these criteria are indeed satisfied for all common semantics of logic programming. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: Paper presented at the 36th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2019), University Of Calabria, Rende (CS), Italy, September 2020, 15+8 page