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Working Papers

Under Review 

Carr, O. (2019). It Takes a Village: Exploring Peer Effects of Preprimary Attendance

The past half-century of desegregation, mainstreaming, and tracking has brought attention to the composition of educational spaces. A key component of this literature is peer effects, including nonlinear peer effects. This study has been designed to analyze academic returns of 15-year-olds internationally as a function of what percent of their peers (in decile “buckets”) attended preprimary school. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions of PISA data are estimated using country fixed effects on the pooled sample with marginal predictions to identify the critical masses for each subject. The results suggest that a critical mass for math exists when peer preprimary enrollment is between 40 and 80 percent. The results also suggest there is no critical mass when looking at reading achievement, meaning more peers having attended preprimary school is better. As public policy is primarily concerned with maximizing public benefit, this analysis suggests that policymakers should strive to maintain 40 to 80 percent preprimary enrollment to maximize public benefits to student mathematics achievement. For reading achievement, policymakers should strive to ensure every child has access to preprimary school.

 

Carr, O. (2018). Minds on the Map: Extending Implicit Theories of Intelligence Research Across International Borders.

In their widely-cited 1988 paper, Dweck and Leggett discuss individuals’ intelligence theory, a concept that seeks to explain how people’s thoughts about intelligence affect their learning. Blackwell et al. (2007) introduced mediators to map the path from a person’s intelligence theory to their academic achievement. This study tests one portion of the mediation model for students of varying economic, social, and cultural statuses (ESCS) in OECD and partner countries/jurisdictions to see if the mediation model holds cross-culturally and for students of various ESCS levels. The main results indicate that the mediation model holds as proposed or with minor modifications in over 90 percent of the jurisdictions represented in this analysis. This number drops slightly to over 75 percent of jurisdictions when analyzing either low or high ESCS students only. There is little evidence that the model holds better for either students of high or low ESCS universally, but there are cross-jurisdiction differences in this. This study provides support for the mediation model tested in this analysis as well as for the larger meditation model developed by Blackwell et al. (2007) in an international context.

 

In Progress 

Carr, O. (2019). Promoting Priorities: Explaining the Adoption of Compulsory Education Laws in Africa.

State interest in mass education systems have been centered on international competitiveness, the state’s own perceived institutional character, and institutional isomorphism, and every developed country has compulsory schooling laws (CSLs), regardless of their political or philosophical stances (Ramirez & Boli, 1987). Africa, however, has had historically lower levels of development of mass education systems compared to the rest of the world. This paper examines how CSLs that require at least 7 years of schooling have diffused throughout Africa from 1960 to 2017. Data primarily come from the World Bank, and this study employs an event history analysis, which combines internal determinants, such as economic characteristics that might predict policy adoption, with regional diffusion, which captures the influence of neighboring societies on the likelihood of adoption. Preliminary results suggest that countries were more likely to adopt as time went on, more likely to adopt if they had Arabic ties, more likely to adopt with a higher age-dependency ratio (more dependents to working-age), and less likely to adopt with a higher percent of the population being youth. Most of the variables taken from the Western literature do not appear to be significant predictors of adoption, and the results for the age-dependency ratio and the percent youth run in the opposite direction as would be expected from the Western literature. This indicates that the existing theory on the diffusion of CSLs does not adequately represent what is happening in Africa and gives insight on how education policies are being adopted.

 

Carr, O. (2019). Teaching Without Boundaries: Collaborative Lesson Planning in the American Context

The past decades have revealed renewed interest in teacher collaboration to support teacher professional development and improve student learning. This study examines three Tennessee schools that have had mixed success with implementing and sustaining a model of teacher collaboration called Teacher Peer Excellence Groups (TPEG). TPEG is modeled after the Japanese or Chinese “lesson study,” which has been in practice for over a century. TPEG was developed by a research team from Vanderbilt, and the team sought to improve on the lesson study model and implementation to better suit the American context. TPEG includes cycles of collaborative lesson planning, observation, and peer feedback. Through observations and structured interviews with teachers and other instructional staff at these three schools, this study examines the adaptation of TPEG over time and the supports and processes related to TPEG, teacher collaboration, and professional development. The preliminary results include the importance of the protection of teachers’ time, proof that the collaboration will work, and types of preferred collaboration.

 

Carr, O. (2019). The Use of Student Assessments to Evaluate Teachers: An International, Repeated Cross -Section Study

There have been increasing levels of monitoring and accountability in education as schools are being painted as bureaucratic organizations that should be objectively evaluated in a standardized manner (Hanberger, 2013; Tatto, 2006). Teacher evaluators are sometimes including student test scores in their evaluations as a supposedly objective measure of teaching abilities (Isoré, 2009), the goal being to hire and fire teachers based on their effects and to motivate teachers to put student learning at the center of their teaching (Adnot, Dee, Katz, & Wyckoff, 2017). This study seeks to test the theory that including student test scores in teacher evaluations will improve student learning on an international scale using PISA data. I test this theory using four waves of PISA data and a fixed effects model. Following the methodology used in Hanushek, Link, & Woessmann (2013), I account for potential selection problems with the aggregation of the key variable of interest to the country-year level. The results suggest there is a positive, statistically significant, and substantive effect of including student test scores in teacher evaluations on student learning in math. They also suggest that the effect is subject-specific with lesser or no effects in reading.

 

Carr, O. & Heuser, B. (2019). International Cost of Compliance of Higher Education.

In FY 2013-14, Vanderbilt University and the Boston Consulting Group conducted a study of 13 American institutions of higher education to try to account for their costs of compliance to federal regulations, such as FERPA, human and animal research, and regional accreditation (Vanderbilt/BCG, 2015). As it was domestically until the Vanderbilt study, the cost of compliance for postsecondary institutions has been understudied internationally. The present study extends this limited cost of compliance research by comparing the costs that postsecondary institutions are responsible for in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia for compliance to federal, state, and local regulations. This qualitative study primarily uses interviews to understand the scope of the regulations with which universities must comply, the level of government from which the regulations originate, the mechanisms of compliance (reporting, inspections, audits, etc.), and the burden of the various compliance requirements. Preliminary results suggest that institutions across all four countries have a variety of compliance requirements that are primarily attached to governmental funding and permission to grant degrees. The compliance activities are for a diverse set of organizations and fulfill those requirements in a number of different ways, largely depending on the regulatory area. It is clear is that the burden of compliance is rising in each of these four countries, and it is seeming to happen across all types of compliance.