Classroom compositional effects on low‐ability students' achievement in China

Abstract

Peer effects are at the center of educational policy debates regarding school choice, ability grouping, and instructional design. Though emerging empirical evidence suggests that positive peer effects exist, less is known about how it affects students with varying cognitive abilities. Using a nationally representative sample from China, we generated a studentlevel measure of classroom composition of peers based on cognitive ability to understand the benefits or pitfalls of placing low-ability students with heterogeneous or homogenous classmates. We conducted this analysis separately for grades seven and nine students after controlling for student background, family characteristics, and school endogeneity.We reaffirmed the overall positive-but small-peer effects on the performance rankings. Low-ability children scored much lower than their counterparts when they studied in cognitively diverse classrooms. However, this effect negates the overall positive impact of studying with high-ability peers and the pattern is consistent across rural and urban schools.

Discovering childhood in contemporary China: Toward a multisystems perspective

“…The purpose of this theme aims to evaluate and understand the parent-involved, peer-assisted and technology-supported strategies for supporting school-age children's positive outcomes. Zhou, Cai, Wang et al (2022), focusing on the normative effects of peers, further study how classroom compositional effects are associated with low-ability students' achievement. Using a student-level measure of classroom peer composition generated by cognitive ability, the results show that studying with high-ability peers is on average conducive to one's own academic achievements.…”

“…Zhou, Cai, Wang et al (2022), focusing on the normative effects of peers, further study how classroom compositional effects are associated with low‐ability students' achievement. Using a student‐level measure of classroom peer composition generated by cognitive ability, the results show that studying with high‐ability peers is on average conducive to one's own academic achievements.…”