Class Size and Class Heterogeneity

By Giacomo de Giorgi, M. Pellizzari, William A Woolston. Social Science Research Network, 2012

71 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study how class size and composition affect the academic and labor market performances of college students, two crucial policy questions given the secular increase in college enrollment. We rely on the random assignment of students to teaching classes. Our results suggest that a one standard deviation increase in the class-size would result in a 0.1 standard deviation deterioration of the average grade. Further, the effect is heterogenous as female and higher income students seem almost immune to the size of the class. Also, the effects on performance of class composition in terms of gender and ability appears to be inverse U-shaped. Finally, a reduction of 20 students (one standard deviation) in one's class size has a positive effect on monthly wages of about 80 Euros (115 USD) or 6% over the average.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab8b0c6d4ec9228d65ca23180b59e65221079796

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In Education

1. A. Brenøe
2. E. Leuven
3. John A. List
4. Hessel Oosterbeek
5. Imran Rasul
6. Ulf Zölitz
7. Adam S. Booij

Citations in the corpus

• Estimating and Testing a Quantile Regression Model with Interactive Effects (2012, unknown): “be a conformable partition of J θ as in Galvao (2011) and Chernozhukov and Hansen (2006), then, δ̂γ = J̄ ′ γ (Jψ − Jαδα), and δ̂β = J̄ ′ β(Jψ − Jαδα).”
• Exposure to More Female Peers Widens the Gender Gap in STEM Participation (2020, background): “For important studies on the impact of peer gender on performance, see Whitmore (2005), Lavy and Schlosser (2011), De Giorgi, Pellizzari, and Woolston (2012), Oosterbeek and Ewijk (2014) as well as Hill (2015).”
• Field experiments in labor economics (2010, background): “Even though the effects of peer composition are mixed (Hoxby 2000b, Zimmerman 2003, Angrist and Lang 2004, Hoxby and Weingarth 2006, Lavy et al. 2008, De Giorgi et al. 2009, Duflo et al. 2009), it might be the case that gender balance plays a key role in the classroom.”
• Ability Peer Effects in University: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment (2016, background): “De Giorgi et al. (2012), Hanushek et al. (2003), Hurder (2012) and Lyle (2009) use the standard deviation to account for peer group heterogeneity and Hurder (2012) uses quantiles.”