Class size effects on student achievement: heterogeneity across abilities and fields

Maria De Paola (), Michela Ponzo and Vincenzo Scoppa ()

Education Economics, 2013, vol. 21, issue 2, 135-153

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze class size effects on college students exploiting data from a project offering special remedial courses in mathematics and language skills to freshmen enrolled at an Italian medium-sized public university. To estimate the effects of class size, we exploit the fact that students and teachers are virtually randomly assigned to teaching classes of different sizes. From our analysis, it emerges that controlling for a number of individual characteristics, larger classes determine a significant and sizeable negative effect on student performance in mathematics. Importantly, this negative effect is significantly larger for low-ability students and negligible for high-ability ones. On the other hand, class size effects do not appear to be relevant for student achievement in language skills.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09645292.2010.511811 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: CLASS SIZE EFFECTS ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT: HETEROGENEITY ACROSS ABILITIES AND FIELDS (2009)
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:taf:edecon:v:21:y:2013:i:2:p:135-153

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CEDE20

DOI: 10.1080/09645292.2010.511811

Access Statistics for this article

Education Economics is currently edited by Caren Wareing and Steve Bradley

More articles in Education Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().