The Impact of Interest in School on Educational Success in Portugal

Pedro Goulart () and Arjun Bedi

No 5462, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Notwithstanding increased educational expenditure, Portugal continues to record poor educational outcomes. Underlining the weak expenditure-educational success link, a large body of work in educational economics displays that there is a tenuous relationship between a range of school inputs and cognitive achievement. Among others, the inability to establish a clear link between inputs and success has been attributed to the difficulty of controlling for unobserved attributes such as ability, motivation and interest. Against this background, and inspired by a large body of work in educational psychology which explicitly measures constructs such as educational motivation and interest, this paper examines whether a child’s interest in school has any bearing on educational success after controlling for the kinds of variables typically used in educational economics analyses. We rely on two data sets collected in Portugal in 1998 and 2001 and examine the interest-educational success link using both cross-section and panel data. Our estimates suggest that after controlling for time-invariant unobservable traits and for the simultaneous determination of interest and achievement, there is little support for the idea that prior interest in school has a bearing on future educational success.

Keywords: educational outcomes; Portugal; schooling; interest in school (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - revised version published as 'Interest in School and Educational Success in Portugal' in: Journal of Educational Research, 2017, 110 (6), 589 - 603

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp5462.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp5462

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().