Family Background, School Choice, and Students' Academic Performance: Evidence from Sri Lanka

Harsha Aturupane, Tomokazu Nomura and Mari Shojo ()
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Harsha Aturupane: The World Bank
Mari Shojo: The World Bank

No 1811, Discussion Papers from Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University

Abstract: Sri Lanka has made great strides in increasing access to schooling. The country stands out as the only country in South Asia that has attained universal primary completion. Despite this past progress, Sri Lankan students still display weak performance. The key challenge now is to enhance the quality of education and improve student academic performance. This paper investigates how the student- and school-level factors are related to the academic performance of Sri Lankan grade 8 students in public schools. It also analyzes the factors related to school choice and how the school choice affects the students' performance. The results of the study suggest that there are large dispersion of average test score among the schools. Looking at the school type, Type 1AB schools outperforms the other types of schools. Students who come from a family with high socioeconomic status are more likely to attend Type 1AB school, and treatment effect of attending Type 1AB school on academic performance is considerably large. Socioeconomic status also explains a significant part of dispersion of academic performance within a school. However, the result does not clearly show the relation between the observable characteristics of the teachers and academic performance of the students.

Keywords: education; academic performance; school choice; socioeconomic status (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2018-03, Revised 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://www.econ.kobe-u.ac.jp/RePEc/koe/wpaper/2018/1811.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)
http://www.econ.kobe-u.ac.jp/RePEc/koe/wpaper/2018/1811R.pdf Revised version, 2018 (application/pdf)

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