Multigrading and child achievement

Gian Paolo Barbetta, Giuseppe Sorrenti and Gilberto Turati ()

No 275, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: We study how multigrading, which is mixing students of different grades into a single class, affects children’s cognitive achievement in primary school. We build instruments to identify the causal effect of multigrading by exploiting an Italian law that controls class size and grade composition. Results suggest that attendance in multigrade versus single-grade classes increases students’ performance on standardized tests by 19 percent of a standard deviation for second graders, and it has zero effect for fifth graders. The positive impact of multigrading for second graders appears to be driven by children sharing their class with peers from higher grades. This last finding rationalizes the absence of a multigrade effect for fifth graders.

Keywords: Multigrade classes; child development; peer effects; rural areas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I26 I28 R53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-01, Revised 2019-08
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: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/146681/13/econwp275.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Multigrading and Child Achievement (2021)
Working Paper: Multigrading and Child Achievement (2018)
Working Paper: Multigrading and Child Achievement (2018)
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:zur:econwp:275

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().