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Together or Separate: Disentangling the Effects of Single-Sex Schooling from the Effects of Single-Sex Schools

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Abstract

To separately identify the effects of single-sex “schooling” versus single- sex “schools”, we exploit two unusual experiments in South Korea: students are randomly assigned to academic high schools within districts regardless of school types, and some schools changed their types from single-sex to coeducational over time. While the overall effects of attending a single-sex school are positive for both boys and girls, these are driven by the differences in resources between school types, rather than classroom gender composition per se. We find that coed (versus single-sex) classroom teaching itself has positive effects for boys, and neutral or negative effects for girls.

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  • Do Won Kwak & Hyejin Ku, 2013. "Together or Separate: Disentangling the Effects of Single-Sex Schooling from the Effects of Single-Sex Schools," Discussion Papers Series 487, School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia.
    • Handle: RePEc:qld:uq2004:487
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