Assessing the effect of school days and absences on test score performance

Esteban Aucejo and Teresa Foy Romano

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Abstract While instructional time is viewed as crucial to learning, little is known about the effectiveness of reducing absences relative to increasing the number of school days. Using administrative data from North Carolina public schools, this paper jointly estimates the effect of absences and length of the school calendar on test score performance. We exploit a state policy that provides variation in the number of school days prior to standardized testing and find substantial differences between these two effects. Extending the school calendar by ten days increases math and reading test scores by only 1.7 and 0.8 of a standard deviation, respectively. A similar reduction in absences would lead to gains of 5.5 in math and 2.9 in reading. We perform a number of robustness checks including utilizing flu data to instrument for absences, family-year fixed effects, distinguishing between excused and unexcused absences, and controlling for a contemporaneous measure of student disengagement. Our results are robust to these alternative specifications. In addition, our findings indicate considerable heterogeneity across student ability, suggesting that targeting absenteeism among low performing students could aid in narrowing current gaps in performance.

JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (74)

Published in Economics of Education Review, 1, December, 2016, 55, pp. 70 - 87. ISSN: 0272-7757

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/68655/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Assessing the effect of school days and absences on test score performance (2016)
Working Paper: Assessing the Effect of School Days and Absences on Test Score Performance (2014)
Working Paper: Assessing the effect of school days and absenceson test score performance (2014)
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