Experimental Estimates of the Impacts of Class Size on Test Scores: Robustness and Heterogeneity

Weili Ding and Steven Lehrer ()

CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics

Abstract: Proponents of class size reductions draw heavily on the results from Project STAR to support their initiatives. Adding to the political appeal of these initiative are reports that minority and economically disadvantaged students received the largest benefits from smaller classes. We extend this research in two directions. First, to address correlated outcomes from the same class size treatment, we account for the over-rejection of the Null hypotheses by using multiple inference procedures. Second, we conduct a more detailed examination of the heterogeneous impacts of class size reductions on measures of cognitive and noncognitive achievement using more flexible models. We find that students with higher test scores received greater benefits from class size reductions. Furthermore, we present evidence that the main effects of the small class treatment are robust to corrections for the multiple hypotheses being tested. However, these same corrections lead the differential impacts of smaller classes by race and freelunch status to become statistically insignificant.

Keywords: class size; multiple inference; unconditional quantile regression; treatment effect heterogeneity; test score gaps; and education experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C21 I20 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2011-06-26, Revised 2011-06-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Journal Article: Experimental estimates of the impacts of class size on test scores: robustness and heterogeneity (2011)
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