A model about the impact of ability grouping on student achievement

David Kiss

Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract: This paper presents a small theoretical model to compare school systems that segregate students by ability ("tracking") with comprehensive ones, which allow for mixing of differently skilled students into same classes. The outcomes of interest are the achievement levels of weaker and better students, and the average achievement of all students. In the model, the instructional pace is tailored to the skill distribution of a class, and higher-achieving peers are an additional source of learning. The results show that differences in both the share of high-achievers and degree of interaction between student types can explain the mixed (quasi-)experimental evidence on the effect of de-tracking on student achievement. As changes in peer quality affect good and weak students' achievement in very different ways, the term "peer effect" should be used with caution.

Keywords: tracking vs. mixing; decomposition of ability peer effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I2 I24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://diskussionspapiere.wiwi.uni-hannover.de/pdf_bib/dp-602.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Model about the Impact of Ability Grouping on Student Achievement (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:han:dpaper:dp-602

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Heidrich, Christian ().