It has become widely accepted that teachers are important in facilitating student learning. Hundreds of empirical studies have tried to explain differences in student performance by evaluating the impact of particular teacher characteristics. Yet, this topic has not been the subject of a systematic review for more than 10 years, even though most of the empirical evidence has emerged over the past decade. This study provides an up-to-date review, drawing on empirical findings from several countries and distinguishing between acquired and sociodemographic teacher characteristics. This review confirms the existing consensus that subject-related degrees and knowledge, and not general teacher certifications, are positively related to student performance and particularly so for Master's degrees in math and science. A new insight is that recent findings point out that teacher experience continues to contribute to student test scores throughout a teacher's career, instead of merely the first few years. An important future research avenue would be to examine which mechanisms can explain these teacher characteristic effects.
Around the developed world, the need for graduates from Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) elds is growing. Research on educational and occupational choice has traditionally focused on the cognitive skills of prospective students, and on how these determine the expected costs and benets of study programs. Little work exists that analyzes the role of personality traits on study choice. This study investigates how personality traits relate to preferences of students for STEM studies and occupations, and to specialization choice in high school. We use a rich data set that combines administrative and survey data of Dutch secondary education students. We nd that personality traits are related to both the preference that students have for STEM as the actual decision to specialize in STEM studies, but to dierent degrees. We identify signicant relations with preference indicators for all Big Five traits, especially for Openness to Experience (positive), Extraversion and Agreeableness (both negative). The size of these relations is often larger than those between cognitive skills and STEM preferences. Personality traits are comparatively less important with respect to the actual specialization choice, for which we identify a robust (and sizable) negative relation with Extraversion, and for girls nd a positive relation with Openness to Experience. The results suggest that once students have to make actual study choice decisions, they rely more on cognitive skills rather than personality traits, in contrast to their expressed preferences. JEL classication: I20 • I21 • J24 PsycINFO classication: 3580 • 3610 Keywords: Personality; Educational choice; STEM * The research was funded by the Dutch Science Organization through grant 407-12-004, project title 'Attracting and retaining top talent for the High Tech Systems and materials'. We would like to thank the participants from the Workshop on Dynamics of Skills Supply and Demand 2018, LESE 2019 and LEER 2019 for their valuable comments.
The literature on gender specic educational achievement indicates that primary school teaching has become more and more a female profession and that the lack of male role models in primary education may negatively inuence the school achievement of boys. This study examines if children's math test scores are higher if they are taught by a teacher of their own gender. For this purpose we use unique Dutch data on 2586 primary school children and identify the same-gender eect by estimating an innovative within class between child gender estimation model. The empirical ndings indicate that children's math performance is not inuenced by the gender of their teacher. JEL-codes: I20 • I21 • I29 Keywords: Teacher • Student achievement • Gender • Mathematics * We would like to thank Torberg Falch, Wim Groot, Henriette Maassen van den Brink, the participants from the ESPE 2012 conference, IWAEE 2012 and the SES conference 2012 for their valuable comments.
In this study, we investigate whether Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and Risk Preference relate to student performance in higher education. We employ anchoring vignettes to correct for heterogeneous scale use in these non-cognitive skills. Our data are gathered among first-year students at a Dutch university. The results show that Conscientiousness is positively related to student performance, but the estimates are strongly biased upward if we use the uncorrected variables. We do not find significant relationships for Emotional Stability but find that the point estimates are larger when using the uncorrected variables. Measured Risk Preference is negatively related to student performance, yet this is fully explained by heterogeneous scale use. These results indicate the importance of using more objective measurements of personality traits.
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