All or Nothing? The Impact of School and Classroom Gender Composition on Effort and Academic Achievement / Soohyung Lee, Lesley J. Turner, Seokjin Woo, Kyunghee Kim.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lee, Soohyung.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Turner, Lesley J.

Woo, Seokjin.

Kim, Kyunghee.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w20722.

NBER working paper series no. w20722

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

We estimate the causal impact of school and classroom gender composition on achievement. We take advantage of the random assignment of Korean middle school students to single-sex schools, co-educational (coed) schools with single-sex classes, and coed schools with mixed-gender classes. Male students attending single-sex classes within coed schools score 0.10 of a standard deviation below male students in mixed-gender classes, and this achievement gap is entirely accounted for by classroom gender composition. Conversely, male students attending single-sex schools outperform their counterparts in mixed-gender classes by 0.15 of a standard deviation. The significant impact of single-sex schools on male students' achievement are not driven by classroom gender composition, but largely accounted for by increases in student effort and study-time. We find little evidence that classroom or school gender composition affect the outcomes of female students.

Notes:

Print version record

December 2014.