This paper investigates whether gender-matching school environments can improve girls' interest and motivation in science. Using the PISA data from South Korea, the empirical results of this paper show that gender-matching school environments have the most positive effect on the attitudinal...

Gender-matching school environments may provide benefits for girls to enhance their performance. By using PISA data from South Korea, this paper suggests that the effects of single-sex schooling and a student-teacher's gender matching are heterogeneous across different student groups. The...

We implement a teaching methodology aimed at improving primary school children's mathematical skills. The methodology, grounded in active and cooperative learning, focuses on peer interaction, sharing of ideas, learning from mistakes, and problem solving. We evaluate the causal effect of the...

This paper focuses on the gendered choice of high school in the Italian context, where children are tracked at age 14 and are free to choose the type of school, with no binding teacher recommendation or ability restriction. It is therefore a context in which preferences, however influenced by...

Different lines of research have argued that specific groups, such as boys or ethnic minorities, are more prone to develop an anti-school culture than others, leading to group differences in the social acceptance of high performers. Taking an ecological view, we ask to what extent the school...

The integration of foreign origin students in host countries’ educational systems has mostly been studied based on cross-sectional data. In contrast, I use data from a national longitudinal education study to calculate achievement gaps in vocabulary, reading and math tests for foreign origin...

Gender differences in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines are widespread in most OECD countries and mathematics is the only subject where typically girls tend to underperform with respect to boys. This paper describes the gender gap in math test scores in Italy,...

This paper investigates the role of social trust in determining one's willingness to compete in math competitions in school, observing how competitive occupational choices often require higher quantitative skills. Using the data of the PISA test in math, the empirical results highlight that a...

It is well established that boys perceive themselves to be better in mathematics than girls, even when their ability is the same. We examine the drivers of this male overconfidence in self-assessed mathematics ability using a longitudinal study of twins. This allows us to control for family...

It is well established that boys perceive themselves to be better in mathematics than girls, even when their ability is the same. We examine the drivers of this male overconfidence in self-assessed mathematics ability using a longitudinal study of twins. This allows us to control for family...