Recent studies conclude that teachers are important for student learning but it remains uncertain what actually determines effective teaching. This study directly peers into the black box of educational production by investigating the relationship between lecture style teaching and student...

This paper examines the extent to which year-9 performance on the National Assessment Program—Language Arts and Numeracy (NAPLAN) predicts access to higher education as determined by subsequent achievement on year-12 Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE) exams. VCE performance is measured...

We investigate whether racial discrimination taking the form of the biased assessment of students is prevalent within Brazilian schools. Robust evidence is drawn from unique data pertaining to middle-school students and educators. After holding constant performance in blindly scored tests of...

This article measures the relationship between a standardized test applied at the national level (Enlace) with bimontly test results at the classroom level. The results for mathematics imply that a one standard deviation increase in cumulative learning measured with the bimonthly tests increase...

Este artículo utiliza un modelo de efectos mixtos para medir la relación entre el conocimiento de una prueba estandarizada a nivel nacional (ENLACE) con pruebas bimestrales administradas a nivel aula. Utilizamos una base de datos confidencial donde observamos tanto el resultado en la prueba...

Estimating the impact of changing school inputs on student performance is often difficult because these inputs are endogenously determined. We investigate a quasi-experiment that altered the number of instructional days prior to a nationwide test in Mexico. Our exogenous source of variation...

The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study testing the hypothesis that rewarding teachers for improved student scores on standardized tests would cause scores to rise. Results, as described in Springer et al. (2010b), did not confirm this hypothesis. In this article we...

Since their first implementation in 2000, the PISA studies have attracted public attention and spurred the demand for institutional changes in schooling systems. The introduction of standardized student tests and of incentives for schools and teachers are notable examples of such institutional...

This study examines the relationship between teaching practices aimed at raising student performance on a high stakes college entrance examination—the Russian Unified State Exam (USE) — and student performance on that test. The study uses data from a school/classroom survey of almost 3,000...