EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Knowledge, Tests, and Fadeout in Educational Interventions

Elizabeth Cascio and Doug Staiger

No 18038, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Educational interventions are often evaluated and compared on the basis of their impacts on test scores. Decades of research have produced two empirical regularities: interventions in later grades tend to have smaller effects than the same interventions in earlier grades, and the test score impacts of early educational interventions almost universally "fade out" over time. This paper explores whether these empirical regularities are an artifact of the common practice of rescaling test scores in terms of a student's position in a widening distribution of knowledge. If a standard deviation in test scores in later grades translates into a larger difference in knowledge, an intervention's effect on normalized test scores may fall even as its effect on knowledge does not. We evaluate this hypothesis by fitting a model of education production to correlations in test scores across grades and with college-going using both administrative and survey data. Our results imply that the variance in knowledge does indeed rise as children progress through school, but not enough for test score normalization to fully explain these empirical regularities.

JEL-codes: I20 I21 I28 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-knm, nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: CH ED LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18038.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:18038

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18038

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18038