Can Gifted and Talented Education Raise the Academic Achievement of All High-Achieving Students?

Adam S. Booij (), Ferry Haan () and Erik Plug ()
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Adam S. Booij: University of Amsterdam
Ferry Haan: University of Amsterdam

No 10836, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We conduct a study under 2,400 third grade students at three large secondary comprehensive schools to evaluate a gifted and talented (GT) program with selective program admission based on past achievement. We construct three complementary estimates of the program's impact on student achievement. First, we use the fragmented GT program implementation (in different tracks at different schools) to get difference-in-differences (DD) estimates for all students above the admission cutoff. Second, we use the GT admission rule to get regression discontinuity (RD) estimates for students near the admission cutoff. And third, we combine the DD and RD designs to estimate how the program's impact varies with past achievement. We find that all participating students do better because of the GT program. Students near the admission cutoff experience a 0.2 standard deviation gain in their grade point average. Students further away from the admission cutoff experience larger gains.

Keywords: difference-in-differences; secondary education; enrichment program; gifted and talented education; regression discontinuity designs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I22 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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