Should We Increase Instruction Time in Low Achieving Schools? Evidence from Southern Italy

This paper investigates the short term effects of a large scale intervention, funded by the European Social Fund, that provides additional instruction time to students in low achieving lower secondary schools of Southern Italy. We control for sorting across classes using the fact that freshman are divided into groups distinguished by letters, they remain in the same group across grades and the composition of teachers in the school assigned to each group is substantially stable over time. We implement a difference-in-differences strategy, and compare contiguous cohorts of freshman enrolled in the same group. We contrast groups with and without additional instruction time in participating schools, to groups in non-participating schools that we select to be similar with respect to a long list of pre-programme indicators. We find that the programme raised test scores in mathematics in schools characterised by students from less advantaged backgrounds. We also find that targeting the best students with extra activities in Italian language comes at the cost of lowering their performance in mathematics. We go beyond average effects, finding that the positive effect documented for mathematics is driven by larger effects for the best students in the group

Average and quantile effects of more instruction time in low achieving schools: evidence from Southern Italy

The thesis is composed by two main chapters. Both study the effectiveness of a program funded by the European Union, which was implemented during the academic year 2010/11 in low achieving lower secondary schools located in four Southern Italian regions . The intervention's aim was to increase student performances in mathematics and Italian language through the provision of extra instruction time, to be held in the afternoon, thus outside regular school time. The first chapter focuses on average treatment effects. I control for sorting across classes using the fact that student are divided into groups distinguished by letters, they remain in the same group across grades and the composition of teachers in the school assigned to each group is substantially stable over time. I implement a difference-in-differences strategy, and compare two contiguous cohorts of sixth grade students enrolled in the same group. I contrast groups with and without additional instruction time in participating schools, to groups in non-participating schools that I selected to be similar with respect to a long list of pre-programme indicators. I find that the programme raised test scores in mathematics in schools characterised by students from less advantaged backgrounds, while no effect is found on Italian language test scores. In particular the gain is higher for the mathematical reasoning dimensions, while the knowledge of mathematics concepts is not affected. In the second chapter, I go beyond average effects, using two non-linear methods (Threshold difference-in-differences and Changes-in-changes) which allow to recover the counterfactual distribution of the treated group had it not been treated and the quantile treatment effects of the intervention. Both methods suggest that the positive effect documented for mathematics is driven by larger effects for the best students in the group, while low achieving students seem not to benefit form the intervention

Monitoring the Evolution of Education and Training Systems: A Guide to the Joint Assessment Framework

This technical report represents the official guide to DG EAC’s Joint Assessment Framework (JAF). The JAF methodology was first introduced by DG EMPL in 2010 to standardise the monitoring of benchmarks and indicators under the Employment Guidelines. Since two of the Employment Guidelines concern education and training, DG EAC was directly involved in developing the methodology and has since introduced it into its own monitoring approach concerning the strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training (ET 2020). The JRC’s Centre for Research on Education and Lifelong Learning (CRELL) has helped EAC to adapt the JAF to the context of education and training, developing the quantitative part of the methodology for the ET 2020 benchmarks. This report details the main empirical, theoretical and policy arguments behind the selection of the various sub-groups and sub-indicators for each of the six operational ET 2020 benchmarks; it also lists the methodological criteria adopted throughout the JAF development work. Finally, the report provides explanations on how to interpret the JAF charts that are produced annually by CRELL for the quantitative assessment.JRC.DDG.01-Econometrics and applied statistic

Indicators for early childhood education and care

The main purpose of this technical brief is to investigate the comparability between two early childhood education and care indicators currently used by the European Commission – namely the Barcelona target and the ET 2020 ECEC benchmark – and to identify methodological differences and common traits that may have implications in their use for policy-making. Results show that, despite being potentially similar measures of participation of children in early childhood education and care in the different countries, they are essentially different in their nature as they cover different groups of individuals. Additionally, the fact that they use different datasets, namely administrative data from UOE and survey data from EU-SILC, implies that they follow diverse data collection protocols; in particular, the use of EU-SILC survey data brings the risk of not having a fully representative sample of the children population; and exposes data to respondent and interviewer’s biases, which further contributes to the existing differences between them. Notwithstanding, results provided in the brief suggest that the different age composition of the two indicators could explain a consistent part of the difference in the overall shares; in the majority of countries, for age groups 4 and 5, numbers are quite similar. Thus, while still taking into account all the caveats explained in this document, we could conclude that for these age groups results could be equally used for policy support. Some suggestions for the improvement of the Barcelona target sub-indicator for the ET 2020 ECEC benchmark within the Joint Assessment Framework are also proposed.JRC.B.4-Human Capital and Employmen

Active Labour Market Policies in Flanders. Evaluation of the ESF “Work Experience for Young Persons” programme

The aim of this report is to evaluate the "Work Experience for Young Persons" (WIJ) programme, implemented in Flanders from 2015 until 2018. The WIJ programme is targeted at unqualified young unemployed with the aim of facilitating their entry to the labour market, through an intensive guiding trajectory which includes labour market orientation and coaching, and possibly competence strengthening activities. The analysis is based on administrative data sources from the Flemish Public Employment Service. Using detailed information on the past labour market histories of youth, we apply matching approaches to evaluate the impact of WIJ in terms of probability of being employed or re-entering education for young unemployed. Our results suggest that those who have participated in the WIJ programme have lower employment and education probabilities. However, if we only consider those whose WIJ intervention lasted less than 14 months (which includes all participants within the standard trajectory), there are no significant differences between the treated and the control group in terms of employment probability. Furthermore, the negative effect on the probability of being enrolled in education is smaller in this group than in the whole sample. Those who followed the standard trajectory thus clearly outperformed those in extended trajectories. Because relatively little is known about the selection process of the treated individuals, these results should be interpreted with caution.JRC.I.1-Monitoring, Indicators & Impact Evaluatio

Cohort Patterns in adult literacy skills: How are new generations doing?

Skills are core elements of the socio-economic prospects of individuals, while they also improve national productivity, growth and social cohesion. Understanding how skills evolve over time and what drives their evolution has become a policy priority of many European countries. Using the 1994–1998 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the 2012 Survey on Adult Skills (PIAAC) we build synthetic cohorts and examine how the population gains, loses or preserves cognitive skills (literacy) over time. While, as expected, deterioration in the level of skills due to ageing is common to almost all the European countries studied, for some of them concerns arise for the occurrence of skill deterioration across generations, especially among less well-educated and medium-educated individuals. Certain countries appear to be doing a poorer job in providing the necessary literacy skills over successive generations