The Long-Run Educational Benefits of High-Achieving Classrooms

Arbeitspapier

Despite the prevalence of school tracking, evidence on whether it improves student success is mixed. This paper studies how tracking within high school impacts high-achieving students' short- and longer-term academic outcomes. Our setting is a large and selective Chinese high school, where first-year students are separated into high-achieving and regular classrooms based on their performance on a standardized exam. Classrooms differ in terms of peer ability, teacher quality, class size, as well as level and pace of instruction. Using newly collected administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we show that high-achieving classrooms improve math test scores by 23 percent of a standard deviation, with effects persisting throughout the three years of high school. Effects on performance in Chinese and English language subjects are more muted. Importantly, we find that high-achieving classrooms substantially raise enrollment in elite universities, as they increase scores on the national college entrance exam—the sole determinant of university admission in China.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 15039

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Analysis of Education ; Education and Inequality ; Returns to Education ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
• Subject: classroom tracking ; peer quality ; teacher quality ; regression discontinuity ; China

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Canaan, Serena ; Mouganie, Pierre ; Zhang, Peng
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2022

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/250700
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET