The effects of the calculation class in elementary school on student outcomes

Mayuko Abe, Fumio Ohtake and Shinpei Sano

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 2025, vol. 76, issue C

Abstract: We examine the impact of introducing a calculation class on the academic outcomes of elementary school students. The calculation class is characterized by instruction using an abacus (soroban in Japanese), a traditional calculation tool in Asia, and teaching by abacus instructors. The calculation class was introduced with time lags across schools and birth cohorts, which allows us to exploit the difference-in-differences strategy. Using administrative data from Amagasaki City in Japan, we find that the calculation class increases mathematics and Japanese scores by 0.145 and 0.0874 standard deviations, respectively. To explore possible mechanisms, we investigate the impact of the calculation class on students’ non-cognitive skills, academic behaviors at home, and the classroom environment. The results indicate that the calculation class improves non-cognitive skills, such as grit and motivation for studying. Furthermore, we find heterogeneous effects across gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and previous academic scores. Our estimation results show that the calculation class has a larger impact on the mathematics scores of female students, students from low-SES families, and previously low-performing students. Finally, we explore the long-term effects and find that, for female students, the impact tends to persist for one year after the class ends, but after that, the effects fade out.

Keywords: Elementary school; Mathematics; Calculation class (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I21 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889158325000097
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jjieco:v:76:y:2025:i:c:s0889158325000097

DOI: 10.1016/j.jjie.2025.101360

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies is currently edited by Takeo Hoshi

More articles in Journal of the Japanese and International Economies from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().