Accounting for Mathematics Performance of High School Students in Mexico: Estimating a Coordination Game in the Classroom

Abstract

This paper estimates a model of the effort decisions of students and teachers in a classroom setting to understand the performance of Mexican high school students on curriculum-based examinations. The model allows for student heterogeneity in initial mathematics preparation and knowledge preference and for teacher heterogeneity in instructional ability and preferences for student knowledge. Survey data include multiple measurements of student and teacher effort, student and teacher preferences, student initial knowledge, and teacher ability. The most important factor accounting for poor performance, the lack of sufficient prior preparation, suggests a mismatch between the curriculum content and entering grade-level mathematics knowledge.

The Effect of Preferential Admissions on the College Participation of Disadvantaged Students: The Role of Pre-College Choices

“…Without this skill measure, it would be difficult to estimate policy impacts on pre-college achievement: using the scores on the entrance exam could introduce selective attrition bias, because the decision to take the exam could be affected by the policy, and using GPA could give misleading results, because GPA is not comparable across schools. Second, we elicited study effort through the survey instruments used in Mexican high schools by Behrman et al (2015) and Todd and Wolpin (2018), complemented with questions on entrance exam preparation. Third, we elicited subjective beliefs about future outcomes and returns to effort.…”

On the Mechanisms of Ability Peer Effects

“…Recent empirical studies have argued that academic peer effects could be largely driven by three types of mechanisms: i) student effort (e.g., Kang et al, 2007;Brunello, De Paola and Scoppa, 2010), ii) group dynamics (e.g., Lavy and Schlosser, 2011;Lavy, Paserman and Schlosser, 2012;Bursztyn and Jensen, 2015;Brady, Insler and Rahman, 2017;Feld and Zölitz, 2017), and iii) teacher effort or school resources (e.g., Duflo, Dupas and Kremer, 2011;Chetty et al, 2011;Hoekstra, Mouganie and Wang, 2018;Todd and Wolpin, 2018). Table 1 lists several of these studies, classifying them by the type of mechanisms they explore.…”

Testable implications of multiple equilibria in discrete games with correlated types

“…Empirical studies typically model such interaction via static or dynamic games with incomplete information, and exploit the equilibrium implications to infer the incentives from observed states and actions. Examples include location choices in the video retail industry in Seim (2006), timing of commercials by radio stations in Sweeting (2009), choices of effort by students and teachers in classrooms in Todd and Wolpin (2018), market entry and exit of grocery stores in Grieco (2014), and the dynamic demand and supply in shipbuilding industry in Kalouptsidi (2018). Popular methods for estimating these games require a reduced-form first step that estimates the conditional choice probabilities (CCPs) in equilibrium.…”