The effect of school closures and distance learning during the COVID19 pandemic on student achievement is still the subject of discussion. After the end of the pandemic-related restrictions, learning losses of students are being assessed and state programs were launched to help students catch up...

Middle school is an important period of development for students. Middle schools in China are either separate schools after grade six or incorporated in the same school complex with the elementary school. Students who attend separate elementary and middle schools change schools more often than...

Hunger and malnourishment can adversely affect students' performance by lowering their effort and cognition during school hours. We conduct a lab-in-the field experiment, leveraging the extension of India's school meal program from primary to middle grades, to study the effects of school-based...

We study the effect of exposure to older, more experienced classroom peers resulting from the widespread use of multi-grade classes in Scottish primary schools. For identification, we exploit that a class-planning algorithm quasi-randomly assigns groups of pupils to multi-grade classes. We find...

This paper analyzes the impact of COVID-19 lockdown measures on children's school resilience. Using an individual fixed-effect linear probability model on Nigeria data, it exploits the quasi-randomness of these measures to estimate their effect on school attendance after the lockdown was lifted....

Although exam scores are reported using numerical values, their measurement scale is ordinal: They depend on the difficulty distribution of the questions in the exam. Hence, population groups or countries should not be ranked according to average exam scores because there may exist an admissible...

Although exam scores are reported using numerical values, their measurement scale is ordinal: They depend on the difficulty distribution of the questions in the exam. Hence, population groups or countries should not be ranked according to average exam scores because there may exist an admissible...

This paper studies the labor market returns to quality of higher education for low-skilled students. Using a regression discontinuity design, we compare students who marginally pass and marginally fail the French high school exit exam from the first attempt. Threshold crossing leads to an...

We report results from a large-scale, pre-registered randomized field experiment in 159 Norwegian schools over four years. The intervention includes students aged 7-9 and consists of pulling students from their regular mathematics classes into small, homogenous groups for mathematics instruction...

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school – socio-economic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This...