Incentives from Curriculum Tracking: Cross-national and UK Evidence

Curriculum tracking creates incentives before its start, and we should expect scores in tested subjects to be higher at that point. I find evidence from both UK and international data for sizable incentive effects. Incentive effects are important from a methodological perspective because they lead to downward bias in value-added estimates of the later age effect of tracking on achievement. They also invalidate placebo tests that work by regressing pre-tracking scores on tracking policies.incentives; curriculum tracking; ability streaming; high-stakes testing; student achievement

Incentives from curriculum tracking

Curriculum tracking creates incentives in the years before its start, and we should therefore expect test scores to be higher during those years. I find robust evidence for incentive effects of tracking in the UK based on the UK comprehensive school reform. Results from the Swedish comprehensive school reform are inconclusive. Internationally, I find a large and widening test score gap between early and late tracking countries. Incentive effects of tracking show how early age scores can be endogenous with respect to later-age policies, and add to a growing literature on incentives in education.Peer reviewe

The size of the core in school choice

JEL Classification: C78, D82, C71We study the determinants of the size of the core in the school choice problem using three years of data from a large higher education application clearinghouse. The clearinghouse uses a variation of the college-optimal stable mechanism (COSM) to assign applicants to slots in Finnish polytechnics. If the core is large, switching to a student-optimal stable mechanism (SOSM) could yield large improvements for applicants at a cost to schools. We however find that the core is either a singleton or very small each year. This suggests that the student/school trade-off is relatively unimportant within the set of stable matchings in Finnish polytechnic assignments. We show that the similarity of COSM and SOSM matchings is due to correlated school priorities, differing numbers of students and slots, and to students only applying to a small number of programs each. Because these properties are common to other higher education school choice problems, our conclusions are likely to generalize. In spite of the fact that Finnish polytechnics jointly only accept a third of applicants, accepted applicants' average matriculation exam grades are not much better than those of the median applicant. We attribute this to the low effective number of programs applied to, and suggest that details in the design of the application process affect the trade-off in match quality

Incentives from curriculum tracking

Abstract Curriculum tracking creates incentives in the years before its start, and we should therefore expect test scores to be higher during those years. I estimate incentive effects using variation from policy experiments in the UK and Sweden as well as from an international cross-section. I find evidence for incentive effects of tracking in the UK and internationally, while Swedish results are inconclusive. Incentive effects of tracking show how early age scores can be endogenous with respect to later-age policies, and add to a growing literature on incentives in education

Why Finnish polytechnics reject top applicants

I use a panel of higher education clearinghouse data to study the centralized assignment of applicants to Finnish polytechnics. Many top applicants remain completely unassigned each year. The same applicants' future applications reveal that many of them should have been admitted to a different program immediately. The application system, however, discourages applicants from applying to multiple programs within the same year, while at the same time leaving them in the dark on the set of programs willing to admit them. Improvements to the application system have the potential to substantially reduce reapplications, thereby shortening long queues into Finnish higher education.peerReviewe

Admissible statistics of educational test scores. 'Estadisticas admisibles de puntuaciones en test educativos'

Resumen basado en el de la publicaciónSe centra en analizar la medición y la interpretación de las puntuaciones obtenidas en las políticas de evaluación educativa. Se argumentan que, como los resultados se miden en una escala ordinal, el uso de métodos basados en la media como la MCO es inadecuado. Se propone el análisis de datos basado en la función cuantil que ofrece resultados mas robustos.NavarraUniversidad de Navarra. Biblioteca; 31080 Pamplona; +34948425600; +3494817731080; [email protected]