Recently, Amber Northern reviewed the top six education studies of 2021 from the Education Gadfly Show. Excerpts of three of the studies appear below:
The Evolution of Gender Gaps in Numeracy and Literacy between Childhood and Young Adulthood, by Francesca Borgonovi, Alvaro Choi, and Marco Paccagnella. Research indicates that gaps in numeracy and literacy skew along gender lines, with boys tending to outperform girls in numeracy and girls tending to outperform boys in literacy. Analysts combined data from existing cross-sectional large-scale assessments that contain representative samples of the same birth cohort at different points in time in up to eleven countries. Thus they could track the evolution of gender gaps for a single cohort of students that participated in different waves of different assessments from ages ten to twenty-seven. They pull data from TIMSS, PIRLS, PISA, and PIACC test administrations. The key finding is that, in a large majority of countries, the gender gap in numeracy in favor of boys tends to be linear, growing as students age. It’s particularly pronounced after they exit compulsory schooling and enter post-secondary education or the labor market. By contrast, the gender gap in literacy is widest during the teenage years. Specifically, girls have a large advantage at ages nine and ten, which grows larger by ages fifteen and sixteen. At ages twenty-six and twenty-seven, however, the advantage shrinks to essentially zero, as young men then have a surprising (but non-statistically-significant) advantage of 13 percent of a standard deviation. Most of these findings also hold true in the United States, although numeracy gaps in favor of boys are even larger.
To What Extent Does In-Person Schooling Contribute to the Spread of COVID-19? Evidence from Michigan and Washington, by Dan Goldhaber, Scott A. Imberman, Katharine O. Strunk, Bryant Hopkins, Nate Brown, Erica Harbatkin, and Tara Kilbride. Researchers examined the extent to which in-person schooling contributed to the spread of Covid-19. They analyzed data on reported Covid cases in Michigan and Washington, as reported by the CDC and the respective state health agencies, as well as data on district-level instructional modality—in-person, hybrid, or remote—collected via monthly surveys administered to school district leaders. Basically, they knew the approximate share of students receiving education in each of these different modes. They also included controls designed to account for non-schooling risk factors for Covid spread—including the share of individuals who mask, the share who stay at home, the county unemployment rate, the share of the population that attend county public schools, the share who are age sixty-five or older, the share that live in a nursing home, and so on. The results show that in-person schooling is not associated with increased spread of Covid—at least in counties reporting low levels of pre-existing Covid cases overall. But increased Covid-19 spread does occur relative to in-person learning in areas with moderate to high pre-existing Covid rates.
The Revealed Preferences for School Reopening: Evidence from Public-School Disenrollment, By Thomas S. Dee, Elizabeth Huffaker, Cheryl Philips, and Eric Sagara. During the first full school year after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, enrollment in U.S. public schools fell by about 1.1 million students, or 2 percent. Researchers examined how school reopening decisions affected those declines. They used federal and state data to gather district enrollment counts from 2015–16 through 2020–21. They also collected district opening plans as aggregated by Burbio and tracked instructional mode status for roughly 1,200 districts at various points in time by school and grade level. The sample encompassed 35 percent of all public school students. Analysts tracked Covid-19 prevalence at the county level and state decisions around Covid-related restrictions, such as stay-at-home orders and public transportation limitations, which could influence schools’ instructional mode and parents’ perceptions of the Covid risk.
The headline finding: The decision to offer remote-only instruction in fall 2020 contributed materially to disenrollment from public schools. Specifically, the study found that offering remote-only instruction exacerbated disenrollment by 42 percent relative to in-person instruction, while hybrid instruction had small and statistically insignificant effects. Yet roughly 57 percent of students faced remote-only instruction as of November 2020. That decline implies that public schools lost roughly 300,000 K–12 students as a result of those decisions. Which suggests that widespread adoption of remote-only instruction explains roughly a quarter of the disenrollment from public schools. The researchers also found that the effects of remote-only instruction on the decline in enrollment were particularly concentrated in the kindergarten and elementary grades. Remote instruction did not appear to influence middle or high school enrollment—or contribute to dropout behavior—nor did hybrid instruction have an impact either way.
For more, see: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/counting-down-top-education-studies-2021
