The Non-Cognitive Returns to Class Size

By Thomas S. Dee, Martin R. West. 2008

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The authors use nationally representative survey data and a research design that relies on contemporaneous within-student and within-teacher comparisons across two academic subjects to estimate how class size affects certain non-cognitive skills in middle school. Their results indicate that smaller eighth-grade classes are associated with improvements in several measures of school engagement, with effect sizes ranging from .05 to .09 and smaller effects persisting 2 years later. Patterns of selection on observed traits and falsification exercises suggest that these results accurately identify (or possibly understate) the causal effects of smaller classes. Given the estimated earnings impact of these non-cognitive skills, the implied internal rate of return from an eighth-grade class-size reduction is 4.6% overall, but 7.9% in urban schools.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4fb6f36d8347a059a8ae62454e78604c023b061

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Citations in the corpus

Promise and Paradox (2016, background): “Furthermore, non-cognitive skills may be more amenable to direct intervention than cognitive ability, particularly beyond infancy and early childhood (Cunha & Heckman, 2008; Dee & West, 2011; Heckman & Kautz, 2013).”
Getting Parents Involved: A Field Experiment in Deprived Schools (2014, unknown): “For the sake of comparison, Dee and West (2011) find that it takes a 1 SD reduction in early class size to obtain a +10% of a SD improvement in non-cognitive skills during middle-school, implying a cost of about 3,400 US$ per student and per year.”
More than just test scores (2012, background): “A more recent study of reduced class sizes also found improved student learning behaviour as a consequence (Dee and West 2011).”
Teacher Support and Engagement in Math and Science: Evidence from the High School Longitudinal Study (2016, methodology): “For this reason, this type of fixed-effects model has been used recently to study the effects of teacher expectations (Kelly & Carbonaro, 2012), and to estimate the effect of teacher characteristics (Dee 2005, 2007) and class size (Dee & West, 2011) on achievement growth.”
Hard evidence on soft skills (2012, methodology): “Using data from Project STAR, Dee and West (2011) find that assignment to a small class is associated with positive changes in personality. In a follow-up analysis, Chetty et al. (2011) examine the Project STAR program and find that students placed in higher quality kindergarten classes—asmeasured b”