IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/ceedps/0063.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Peer Effects and Pupil Attainment: Evidence from Secondary School Transition

Author

Listed:
  • Steve Gibbons
  • Shqiponja Telhaj

Abstract

It is a common belief that children will thrive if educated amongst better class and schoolmates. It is a belief that guides many parents in their choice of school, and has important implications for policy on school choice and organisation. Many studies have tried to measure this 'peer-group' effect, but the enterprise is plagued by conceptual and empirical difficulties. In this study, we use the population of state Secondary school pupils in England to tease out how pupil attainments at age 14 respond to differences in the prior, age-11 attainments of their current school grade peer-group. Data on home addresses and school attendance allow us to compare outcomes of children who live in the same street, or who attended the same Primary school up to age 11, but then move on to different Secondary schools with different peer-group quality. These 'peer-group' effects seem to exist, but they are small in magnitude - a 1 s.d. increase in peer-group prior attainments allows a pupil to improve their own score by barely 0.08 of a standard deviation. We tackle various gnarly empirical problems arising in regression models of pupil attainments that incorporate individual and group prior attainments as explanatory variables. Estimates from such models are seriously biased by transient components in prior pupil attainments, correlation between current and prior peer-group characteristics and by ability sorting into Secondary schooling. We address these issues by using teachers predictions as instruments for prior attainments, defining a pupil's current peer-group in terms of those school mates with whom he or she has had no contact in the past, and by predicting current peer-group attainments with the productivity of their origin Primary schools, measured by the gain in attainments of different cohorts between ages 7 and 11.

Suggested Citation

  • Steve Gibbons & Shqiponja Telhaj, 2006. "Peer Effects and Pupil Attainment: Evidence from Secondary School Transition," CEE Discussion Papers 0063, Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE.
  • Handle: RePEc:cep:ceedps:0063
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cee/ceedp63.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gibbons, Stephen & Silva, Olmo, 2008. "Urban density and pupil attainment," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(2), pages 631-650, March.
    2. Marco Tonello, 2011. "Mechanisms of peer interactions between native and non-native students: rejection or integration?," Working Papers 2011/21, Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB).
    3. Dominique Goux & Eric Maurin, 2007. "Close Neighbours Matter: Neighbourhood Effects on Early Performance at School," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 117(523), pages 1193-1215, October.
    4. Ammermüller, Andreas & Pischke, Jörn-Steffen, 2006. "Peer Effects in European Primary Schools: Evidence from PIRLS," IZA Discussion Papers 2077, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Nicole Schneeweis & Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, 2008. "Peer effects in Austrian schools," Studies in Empirical Economics, in: Christian Dustmann & Bernd Fitzenberger & Stephen Machin (ed.), The Economics of Education and Training, pages 133-155, Springer.
    6. Chris Hamnett & Mark Ramsden & Tim Butler, 2007. "Social Background, Ethnicity, School Composition and Educational Attainment in East London," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 44(7), pages 1255-1280, June.
    7. MacCoun Robert & Cook Philip J. & Muschkin Clara & Vigdor Jacob L, 2008. "Distinguishing Spurious and Real Peer Effects: Evidence from Artificial Societies, Small-Group Experiments, and Real Schoolyards," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 4(3), pages 695-714, December.
    8. Stephen Gibbons & Shqiponja Telhaj, 2007. "Are Schools Drifting Apart? Intake Stratification in English Secondary Schools," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 44(7), pages 1281-1305, June.
    9. Esteban M. Aucejo & Patrick Coate & Jane Cooley Fruehwirth & Sean Kelly & Zachary Mozenter, 2018. "Teacher effectiveness and classroom composition," CEP Discussion Papers dp1574, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    10. Victor Lavy & Analia Schlosser, 2011. "Mechanisms and Impacts of Gender Peer Effects at School," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 3(2), pages 1-33, April.
    11. McNally, Sandra, 2010. "Evaluating education policies: the evidence from economic research," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 57973, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    12. Adele Atkinson & Simon Burgess & Paul Gregg & Carol Propper & Steven Proud, 2008. "The Impact of Classroom Peer Groups on Pupil GCSE Results," The Centre for Market and Public Organisation 08/187, The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK.
    13. Sund, Krister, 2009. "Estimating peer effects in Swedish high school using school, teacher, and student fixed effects," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 329-336, June.
    14. Foster, Gigi & Frijters, Paul, 2010. "Students' beliefs about peer effects," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 108(3), pages 260-263, September.
    15. Chen, Xi & Kanbur, Ravi & Zhang, Xiaobo, 2011. "Peer effects, risk pooling, and status seeking: What explains gift spending escalation in rural China?," IFPRI discussion papers 1151, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:ceedps:0063. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/cee-discussion-papers/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.