Academic Peer Effects with Different Group Assignment Policies : Residential Tracking versus Random Assignment
This paper studies the relative academic performance of students tracked or randomly assigned to South African university dormitories. Tracked or streamed assignment creates dormitories where all students obtained similar scores on high school grad...
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/02/19135855/academic-peer-effects-different-group-assignment-policies-residential-tracking-versus-random-sssignment http://hdl.handle.net/10986/17331 |
| Summary: | This paper studies the relative academic
performance of students tracked or randomly assigned to
South African university dormitories. Tracked or streamed
assignment creates dormitories where all students obtained
similar scores on high school graduation examinations.
Random assignment creates dormitories that are approximately
representative of the population of students. Tracking
lowers students' mean grades in their first year of
university and increases the variance or inequality of
grades. This result is driven by a large negative effect of
tracking on low-scoring students' grades and a
near-zero effect on high-scoring students' grades.
Low-scoring students are more sensitive to changes in their
peer group composition and their grades suffer if they live
only with low-scoring peers. In this setting, residential
tracking has undesirable efficiency (lower mean) and equity
(higher variance) effects. The result isolates a pure peer
effect of tracking, whereas classroom tracking studies
identify a combination of peer effects and differences in
teacher behavior across tracked and untracked classrooms.
The negative pure peer effect of residential tracking
suggests that classroom tracking may also have negative
effects unless teachers are more effective in homogeneous
classrooms. Random variation in peer group composition under
random dormitory assignment also generates peer effects.
Living with higher-scoring peers increases students'
grades and the effect is larger for low-scoring students.
This is consistent with the aggregate effects of tracking
relative to random assignment. However, using peer effects
estimated in randomly assigned groups to predict outcomes in
tracked groups yields unreliable predictions. This
illustrates a more general risk that peer effects estimated
under one peer group assignment policy provide limited
information about how peer effects might work with a
different peer group assignment policy. |
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