We study on-the-job learning among classroom teachers, especially learning skills from coworkers. Using data from a new field experiment, we document meaningful improvements in teacher job performance when high-and low-performing teachers working at the same school are paired and asked to work together on improving the low-performer's skills. In particular, pairs are asked to focus on specific skills identified in the low-performer's prior performance evaluations. In the classrooms of low-performing teachers treated by the intervention, students scored 0.12 standard deviations higher than students in control classrooms. These improvements in teacher performance persisted, and perhaps grew, in the year after treatment. Empirical tests suggest the improvements are likely the result of low-performing teachers learning skills from their partner. " Gary Becker (1962) Can employees learn job skills from their coworkers? Whether and how peers contribute to on-the-job learning, and at what costs, are practical questions for personnel management.Economists' interest in these questions dates to at least Alfred Marshall (1890) and, more recently, Gary Becker (1962) and Robert Lucas (1988). Yet, despite the intuitive role for coworkers in human capital development, empirical evidence of learning from coworkers is scarce. 2 In this paper we present new evidence from a random-assignment field experiment in U.S. public schools: low-performing classroom teachers in treatment schools were each matched to a high-performing colleague in their school, and pairs were encouraged to work together on improving their teaching skills. We report positive treatment effects on teacher productivity, as measured by contributions to student achievement growth, particularly for low-performing teachers. We then test empirical predictions consistent with peer learning and other potential mechanisms.While there is limited evidence on learning from coworkers specifically, there is a growing literature on productivity spillovers among coworkers generally. Morreti (2004) and Battu, Belfield, and Sloane (2003) document human capital spillovers broadly, using variation between firms, but without insight to mechanisms. Several other papers, each focusing on a specific firm or occupation as we do, also find spillovers; the apparent mechanisms are shared production opportunities or peer influence on effort (Ichino and Maggi 2000, Hamilton, Nickerson and Owan 2003, Bandiera, Barankay and Rasul 2005, Mas and Moretti 2009, Azoulay, Graff Zivin, and Wang 2010. Moreover, these spillovers may be substantial. Lucas 2 We are focused in this paper on coworker peers and learning on-the-job. A large literature examines the role of peers in classroom learning and other formal education settings (for a review see Sacerdote 2010). 2(1988) suggests human capital spillovers, broadly speaking, could explain between-country differences in income.One empirical example of learning from coworkers comes from the study of classroom teachers. Jackson and Bruegma...

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ObjectiveAmericans do not vaccinate nearly enough against Influenza (flu) infection, despite severe health and economic burden of influenza. Younger people are disproportionately responsible for transmission, but do not suffer severely from the flu. Thus, to achieve herd immunity, prosocial motivation needs to be a partial driver of vaccination decisions. Past research has not established the causal role of prosociality in flu vaccination, and the current research evaluates such causal relationship by experimentally eliciting prosociality through messages about flu victims.MethodsIn an experimental study, we described potential flu victims who would suffer from the decision of others to not vaccinate to 3952 Internet participants across eight countries. We measured sympathy, general prosociality, and vaccination intentions. The study included two identifiable victim conditions (one with an elderly victim and another with a young victim), an unidentified victim condition, and a no message condition.ResultsWe found that any of the three messages increased flu vaccination intentions. Moreover, this effect was mediated by enhanced prosocial motives, and was stronger among people who were historical non-vaccinators. In addition, younger victim elicited greater sympathy, and describing identifiable victims increased general sympathy and prosocial motives.ConclusionsThese findings provide direct experimental evidence on the causal role of prosocial motives in flu vaccination, by showing that people can be prompted to vaccinate for the sake of benefiting others.

This study examined the parenting and family life correlates of childhood hyperactivity in a community sample of London school children. Twenty-eight boys with pervasive hyperactivity were compared to 30 classroom control children on a range of parenting and family functioning measures. Results showed that poor parent coping and the use of aggressive discipline methods were significantly associated with hyperactivity after adjusting for the effects of conduct disorder and parent mental health. The best parenting predictor of hyperactivity was disciplinary aggression. Findings suggest that the quality of parenting provided for hyperactive children may contribute to their behavioural difficulties, and highlights the need to examine more closely the role of parenting attitudes and behaviour in shaping the course, prognosis, and treatment outcomes for children with hyperactivity.

It has been suggested that both familiarity and recollection contribute to the recognition decision process. In this paper, we leverage the form of false alarm rate functions-in which false-alarm rates describe an inverted U-shaped function as the time between study and test increases-to assess how these processes support retention of semantic and surface form information from previously studied words. We directly compare the maxima of these functions for lures that are semantically related and lures that are related by surface form to previously studied material. This analysis reveals a more rapid loss of access to surface form than to semantic information. To separate the contributions of item familiarity and reminding-induced recollection rejection to this effect, we use a simple multinomial process model; this analysis reveals that this loss of access reflects both a more rapid loss of familiarity and lower rates of recollection for surface form information. Keywordsrecognition; familiarity; reminding; recollection rejection; conjunction lures; semantic lures; multinomial process modeling Recent memory research incorporates a prominent role for understanding the ways in which misremembering, as well as remembering, can inform memory theory (Gallo, 2006;Roediger, 1996). Within recognition memory, evaluating the relationships between studied stimuli and test stimuli and the conditions that promote false remembering reveals a great deal about the encoding strategies (Matzen & Benjamin, 2009), decision processes (Benjamin, 2001;Miller & Wolford, 1999), and representations that support recognition (cf. Brainerd, Reyna, Wright, & Mojardin, 2003;Brainerd & Reyna, 2001). This paper adds to the literature on memory errors by using them to investigate the time courses of two component processes that are thought to contribute to recognitionfamiliarity and recollection rejection. Specifically, we compare these two processes for lures that are semantically related to studied words as opposed to lures that share surface features NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptMemory. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 January 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript(syllables with the same orthography) but not semantic features with studied words. Previous research suggests that differences in how semantic and surface form information are processed at study (Matzen & Benjamin, 2009) and at test (Odegard, Lampinen, & Toglia, 2005) play a crucial role in determining how susceptible people will be to different types of memory errors. Comparing the time courses of familiarity and recollection rejection for lures that are related to studied items by shared semantics or shared surface features allows us to draw novel conclusions about the time course of item information decay and the processes underlying that decay. Through experimental evidence and modeling, we lay out a theory about the relationship between familiarity and recollection that accounts for the joint set of false alarm func...