Causal inference involves determining whether a treatment (e.g., an education program) causes a change in outcomes (e.g., academic achievement). It is well-known that causal effects are more challenging to estimate than associations. Over the past 50 years, the potential outcomes framework has become one of the most widely used approaches for…

Policymakers are increasingly interested in the extent to which experimental results generalize from a sample to a population of inference. When the sample is not randomly selected, propensity score methods are used to reweight the sample. Subclassification by propensity score is commonly used in which the population is partitioned into strata…

Inequalities do not end once students enter higher education. Yet, the majority of papers on the effectiveness of higher education aid examine its impact on college enrolment. In this paper, we provide evidence on the causal impact of means-tested but otherwise unconditional financial aid on the outcomes of students who have already enrolled in…

Using German data, we examined the effects of one specific type of acceleration--grade skipping--on academic performance. Prior research on the effects of acceleration has suffered from methodological restrictions, especially due to a lack of appropriate comparison groups and a priori measurements. For this reason, propensity score matching was…

The purpose of this study was to examine the potential for using propensity score-based matching methods to estimate teacher contributions to student learning. Value-added models are increasingly used in teacher accountability systems in the United States in spite of ongoing qualms about the validity of teacher quality estimates resulting from…

The purpose of this study was to examine the potential for using propensity score-based matching methods to estimate teacher contributions to student learning. Value-added models are increasingly used in teacher accountability systems in the United States in spite of ongoing qualms about the validity of teacher quality estimates resulting from…

Person-fit assessment may help the researcher to obtain additional information regarding the answering behavior of persons. Although several researchers examined person fit, there is a lack of research on person-fit assessment for mixed-format tests. In this article, the lz statistic and the ?2 statistic, both of which have been used for tests…

Domestic attempts to use financial incentives for teachers to increase student achievement have been ineffective. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting the power of loss aversion--teachers are paid in advance and asked to give back the money if their students do not improve sufficiently--increases math test scores between 0.201 (0.076) and…

The SEED schools, which combine a "No Excuses'' charter model with a five-day-a-week boarding program, are America's only urban public boarding schools for the poor. We provide the first causal estimate of the impact of attending SEED schools on academic achievement, with the goal of understanding whether changing a student's environment through…

In most school achievement research, the relationships between achievement and explanatory variables follow the Newton and Einstein concept/principle and the viewpoint of the macro-observer: Deterministic measures based on the mean value of a sufficiently large number of schools. What if the relationships between achievement and explanatory…

The study of prediction bias is important and the last five decades include research studies that examined whether test scores differentially predict academic or employment performance. Previous studies used ordinary least squares (OLS) to assess whether groups differ in intercepts and slopes. This study shows that OLS yields inaccurate inferences…

In longitudinal education studies, assuming that dropout and missing data occur completely at random is often unrealistic. When the probability of dropout depends on covariates and observed responses (called "missing at random" [MAR]), or on values of responses that are missing (called "informative" or "not missing at random" [NMAR]),…

The first chapter studies the effects of a teacher performance bonus program implemented in Brazil in 2008. The program covered all schools directly managed by the State of Sao Paulo government, and was based on a standardized test run by the state education authority. I use high-school exit exams organized by the federal government (ENEM) to…