scholarly journals Yes, You Can! Effects of Transparent Admission Standards on High School Track Choice: A Randomized Field Experiment

Social Forces ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamás Keller ◽  
Károly Takács ◽  
Felix Elwert
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Field Experiment ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Spillover Effect ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Randomized Field Experiment ◽  
Academic Track ◽  
Admission Standards

Abstract High school track choice determines college access in many countries. We hypothesize that some qualified students avoid the college-bound track in high school simply because they overestimate admission requirements. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a randomized field experiment that communicated the admission standards of local secondary schools on the academic track to students in Hungary before the application deadline. We targeted the subset of students (“seeds”) who occupied the most central position in the classroom-social networks, aiming to detect both direct effects on the track choice of targeted seeds and spillover effects on their untreated peers. We found neither a direct effect nor a spillover effect on students’ applications or admissions on average. Further analyses, however, revealed theoretically plausible heterogeneity in the direct causal effect of the intervention on the track choice of targeted seeds. Providing information about admission standards increased applications and admissions to secondary schools on the academic track among seeds who had a pre-existing interest in the academic track but were unsure of their chances of admission. This demonstrates that publicizing admissions standards can set students on a more ambitious educational trajectory. We discuss the implications for theory and policy.

Making the Most of School Vacation: A Field Experiment of Small Group Math Instruction

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-331
Author(s):  
Beth E. Schueler
Keyword(s):  
Field Experiment ◽  
English Language ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Primary Teacher ◽  
Math Instruction ◽  
Effective Manner ◽  
School Suspensions ◽  
Out Of School

Catching students up who have fallen behind academically is a key challenge for educators, and can be difficult to do in a cost-effective manner. This field experiment examines the causal effect of a program designed to provide struggling sixth and seventh graders with math instruction delivered in small groups of roughly ten students by select teachers over weeklong vacation breaks. The program was implemented in a set of low-performing Massachusetts middle schools undergoing turnaround reforms. Attendance at these “Vacation Academies” increased the probability that students scored proficient or higher on Common Core–aligned math exams by 10 percentage points and reduced students’ exposure to exclusionary discipline by decreasing out-of-school suspensions post-Academy. I find suggestive evidence of positive spillover effects on English Language Arts achievement and end-of-course grades in math and reading. Participants assigned to a single primary teacher for the entire week saw larger reductions in out-of-school suspensions than did students who rotated through teachers specializing in particular lessons. However, teacher specialization was associated with greater test score gains, suggesting a trade-off in outcomes depending on program design. Overall, the program's low cost and lack of a highly competitive teacher selection process make it a scalable approach to individualizing instruction.

Information Spillovers: Another Look at Experimental Estimates of Legislator Responsiveness

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Coppock
Keyword(s):  
Field Experiment ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Quarterly Journal ◽  
Analytic Framework ◽  
Information Spillovers ◽  
Experimental Intervention ◽  
Indirect Treatment ◽  
Voting Decisions ◽  
Share Information

AbstractA field experiment carried out by Butler and Nickerson (Butler, D. M., and Nickerson, D. W. (2011). Can learning constituency opinion affect how legislators vote? Results from a field experiment. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 6, 55–83) shows that New Mexico legislators changed their voting decisions upon receiving reports of their constituents’ preferences. The analysis of the experiment did not account for the possibility that legislators may share information, potentially resulting in spillover effects. Working within the analytic framework proposed by Bowers et al. (2013), I find evidence of spillovers, and present estimates of direct and indirect treatment effects. The total causal effect of the experimental intervention appears to be twice as large as reported originally.

Creating Social Contagion Through Firm-Mediated Message Design: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianshu Sun ◽  
Siva Viswanathan ◽  
Elena Zheleva
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Field Experiment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Social Contagion ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
Message Design ◽  
Message Content ◽  
Randomized Field Experiment

We study whether and how a firm can enhance social contagion simply by varying the message shared by customers with their friends. We focus on two key components of information contained in the message—information about the sender’s purchase status prior to referral and information about the existence of referral rewards—and their impacts on the recipient’s purchase decision and further referral behavior. In collaboration with an online daily-deal platform, we design and conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment involving more than 75,000 customers to identify the causal effect of different message designs on creating social contagion. We find that small variations in message content can have a significant impact on both recipients’ purchase and referral behaviors. Specifically, we find that (1) adding only information about the sender’s purchase status increases the likelihood of the recipient’s purchase but has no impact on follow-up referrals, (2) adding only information about referral reward increases the recipient’s follow-up referrals but has no impact on purchase likelihood, and (3) adding information about both the sender’s purchase and the referral rewards increases neither the likelihood of purchase nor follow-up referrals. We build a model to analyze the tradeoff between more adoption and more diffusion and implement the best-performing message design in a production system with millions of shared messages per year (with a projected increase in net profits of more than US$1 million per year). We further exploit the rich heterogeneity in deal, recipient, sender, and social-tie characteristics and examine the mechanisms underlying the effect of message design. The results suggest that both social learning and social utility are at work, and the attenuation in the recipient’s purchase is mainly driven by a decrease in social learning resulting from credibility concerns. The findings of the study provide actionable guidelines to firms for optimal design of messages at the aggregate and more granular levels. This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems.

scholarly journals A field experiment on community policing and police legitimacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (40) ◽  
pp. 19894-19898 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Peyton ◽  
Michael Sierra-Arévalo ◽  
David G. Rand
Keyword(s):  
Field Experiment ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Police Legitimacy ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Public ◽  
Randomized Field Experiment ◽  
Attitudes Toward Police ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Attitudes Toward The Police

Despite decades of declining crime rates, longstanding tensions between police and the public continue to frustrate the formation of cooperative relationships necessary for the function of the police and the provision of public safety. In response, policy makers continue to promote community-oriented policing (COP) and its emphasis on positive, nonenforcement contact with the public as an effective strategy for enhancing public trust and police legitimacy. Prior research designs, however, have not leveraged the random assignment of police–public contact to identify the causal effect of such interactions on individual-level attitudes toward the police. Therefore, the question remains: Do positive, nonenforcement interactions with uniformed patrol officers actually cause meaningful improvements in attitudes toward the police? Here, we report on a randomized field experiment conducted in New Haven, CT, that sheds light on this question and identifies the individual-level consequences of positive, nonenforcement contact between police and the public. Findings indicate that a single instance of positive contact with a uniformed police officer can substantially improve public attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. These effects persisted for up to 21 d and were not limited to individuals inclined to trust and cooperate with the police prior to the intervention. This study demonstrates that positive nonenforcement contact can improve public attitudes toward police and suggests that police departments would benefit from an increased focus on strategies that promote positive police–public interactions.

scholarly journals Incentives and Unintended Consequences: Spillover Effects in Food Choice

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 66-95
Author(s):  
Manuela Angelucci ◽  
Silvia Prina ◽  
Heather Royer ◽  
Anya Samek
Keyword(s):  
Field Experiment ◽  
Food Choice ◽  
Spillover Effect ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Positive Spillover ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Positive Impacts ◽  
Negative Spillover

Little is known about how peers influence the impact of incentives. We study how peers’ actions and incentives can lead to peer spillover effects. Using a field experiment on snack choice in the school lunchroom (choice of grapes versus cookies), we randomize who receives incentives, the fraction of peers incentivized, and whether or not it can be observed that peers’ choices are incentivized. We show that, while peers’ actions of picking grapes have a positive spillover effect on children’s take-up of grapes, seeing that peers are incentivized to pick grapes has a negative spillover effect on take-up. When incentivized choices are public, incentivizing all children to pick grapes, relative to incentivizing none, has no statistically significant effect on take-up, as the negative spillover offsets the positive impacts of incentives. (JEL C93, D12, I21, J13)

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