Temperature and high-stakes cognitive performance: Evidence from the national college entrance examination in China

By Joshua Graff Zivin, Yingquan Song, Peng Zhang, Qu Tang. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2018

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We provide the first nation-wide estimates of the effects of temperature on high-stakes cognitive performance in a developing country using data from the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in China. The NCEE is one of the most important institutions in China and affects millions of families. We find that a one-standard-deviation increase in temperature during the exam period within counties (2 °C/3.6 °F) decreases the total test score by 0.68%, or 5.83% of a standard deviation, with effects concentrated on the highest performing students. This suggests that temperature plays an important role in high-stakes cognitive performance and has potentially far-reaching impacts for the careers and lifetime earnings of students.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aede5a665953a43f630ffb1aba7e7f0fa23aa985

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Citations in the corpus

The unintended impacts of agricultural fires: Human capital in China (2019, result): “While we spend more time putting these magnitudes in context later in the paper, it is worth noting that they are broadly consistent with the negative impacts of extreme heat on test performance found by others in China as well as other countries (Park, 2018; Graff Zivin et al., 2018a, 2018b).”