NAPLAN scores as predictors of access to higher education in Victoria

Abstract: This paper examines the extent to which year-9 performance on the National Assessment Program—Language Arts and Numeracy (NAPLAN) predicts access to higher education as determined by subsequent achievement on year-12 Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE) exams. VCE performance is measured via three binary indicators: achieving an Australian tertiary admission rank (ATAR) above 50 ("ATAR50"), above 70 ("ATAR70"), and above 90 ("ATAR90"); and two continuous indicators: ATAR and the Tertiary Entrance Aggregate (TEA). We find that a four-way classification of year-9 NAPLAN results explains 35% of the  variance in ATAR50, 37% in ATAR70 and 26% in ATAR90; and NAPLAN scores and basic demographic indicators explain 38% of the variance in ATAR and 42% of the variance in TEA values. Examining the joint effect of year-9 NAPLAN scores and socio-economic status in predicting VCE outcomes, we find that while both are significant, NAPLAN scores have a much stronger effect. At the school level, we find that predictions of success rates based on NAPLAN scores and basic demographic indicators

Enforcing compulsory schooling by linking welfare payments to school attendance: lessons from Australia’s Northern Territory

Efforts to enforce compulsory schooling by linking welfare assistance to school attendance are rarely successful in themselves, according to this report. Abstract Efforts to enforce compulsory schooling by linking welfare assistance to school attendance are rarely successful in themselves. One reason is a lack of credibility: targeted families may anticipate that welfare administrators will be reluctant to withdraw support when attendance does not improve. Australia\u27s School Enrolment and Attendance through Welfare Reform Measure (SEAM) demonstrates the impact of a credible threat. Targeting the Indigenous population of the Northern Territory, its credibility stemmed from the extreme circumstances created by the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act and from the troubled history of race relations in Australia. We show, using a difference-in-difference analysis of standardized test data (NAPLAN), that SEAM had a substantial, immediate impact: in its first year it triggered an increase in test participation rates of 16- 20 percentage points over pre-SEAM levels; and it significantly increased the share of tested cohorts achieving national minimum standards by 5-10 percentage points. However, welfare payments were rarely withheld from truant families and participation rates fell in subsequent years, though remaining significantly above pre-SEAM levels. This suggests that initiatives such as SEAM will not be fully effective in the longer term unless accompanied by measures that increase parents’ and children’s appreciation of the value of schooling

Understanding Compulsory Schooling Legislation: A Formal Model and Implications for Empirical Analysis

We construct a simple model of compulsory schooling in which legislation and compliance are endogenously determined by individuals disciplined by social norms, optimizing their voting decisions and the school attendance of their children. The model provides a formal framework for interpreting empirical results on the effect of compulsory-schooling legislation (CSL) on enrollment. This sheds light on the use of CSL as an instrumental variable to identify the benefits of schooling, suggesting how the estimates it produces may be biased.compliance norms, compulsory schooling, education

Deceit and transparency in Placebo Research

Studies designed to elicit the full strength of the placebo effect differ from those in which the placebo effect represents a nuisance factor to be accounted for in order to establish the efficacy of a treatment. In the latter, informed consent is the rule; in the first, while consent may be informed in some narrow sense of the word, deception is common. However, the trickery of placebo experimentation goes beyond straightforward lies to include the use of crafty ambiguities, half-truths, and deliberate omissions in scripts read to the subjects of these studies. As words come to resemble therapeutic agents in their own right, it is only to be expected that researchers would methodically exploit verbal effects to evoke the responses they are looking for. Even experiments in which placebo is disclosed as placebo have used language in leading and misleading ways. Such studies are conducted in the hope of yielding results that might translate into clinical practice, but it should be noted that good clinical practice has a placebo value of its own — that is, confers a benefit over and beyond the specific effects of treatments — even if nothing like a sugar pill is administered

Buried in Silence: Homosexuality and the Feighner Criteria

The diagnostic revolution that culminated in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1980) began with the publication in 1972 of the Feighner criteria, a set of rules for the identification of 16 disorders. While Feighner et al. claim that their diagnostic categories rest on solid data, the fact is that one was soon to be removed by the APA from its classification of mental disorders: homosexuality. However, the anomaly of an extinct category in a list of supposedly validated diagnostic criteria never became a point of discussion, quite as if the topic were unmentionable. It was in fact even more of an embarrassment than either side in the homosexuality debate seems to have realized at the time. Upon examination, the evidence offered by Feighner et al. in support of the diagnosis of homosexuality proves to be nil. Had there not been an informal embargo on discussion of the status of homosexuality in the Feighner document, the makers of DSM-III might have recognized that the diagnosis fails all Feighner tests of validity. Had they attached greater importance to these tests, the concept of a disorder that was built into DSM-III might have taken a different shape

In Defense of Frederick Crews

First paragraph: In her review of Frederick Crews’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion Lisa Appignanesi argues that Freud’s talking cures, while not working miracles, were innocuous compared to the harm done under the regime of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual even now. While I share Lisa Appignanesi’s concern over the misapplication of diagnostic labels and the over-prescription of psychoactive drugs, it should be noted that the interpretive liberties taken by the psychoanalysts who ruled American psychiatry as late as the 1970’s had much to do with the rise of the DSM diagnostic system as we know it. Instituted in DSM-III in 1980, this system proclaimed an “atheoretical” stance toward etiology, in direct reproach of the psychoanalytic practice of etiological speculation. As Nancy Andreasen, a member of the DSM-III Task Force and later the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry, wrote in retrospect, it was the recognition “that the psychodynamic emphasis had gone too far, leading to diagnostic imprecision,” that led to the making of DSM-III