Does Classroom Gender Composition Affect School Dropout?

Abstract

Does Classroom Gender Composition Affect School Dropout?Measuring the gender peer effects on student achievement has recently attracted a lot of attention in the literature. Yet, the results are inconclusive. A substantial amount of research shows that having relatively more girls in a division increases the academic achievement of all students. Nevertheless, the identification of pure gender effects remains a challenge due to the fact that girls outperform boys in overall academic performance. Our study overcomes this identification problem in a setting where girls are not academically better. Using 2009-2010 school year data on 8 th graders in Turkey, this paper disentangles pure "academic" peer effects and "gender" peer effects. Our estimations reveal that the higher the share of females in a division, the lower the likelihood that a student drops out. One standard deviation increase in the share of females in the division decreases the likelihood of dropout by 0.3 percentage points. This result holds even though females are 9.32 percentage points more likely to drop out. These findings are robust to the inclusion of various control variables e.g. parental and academic background of the student, school and regional characteristics. We also find that the gender peer effects are prevalent in both females and males.

Gender, teaching style, classroom composition and alienation from learning: an exploratory study

“…However, there is no clear evidence on the question whether there exists symmetry or asymmetry in terms of gendered responses on the increase in the proportion of females (or males) in class (Borbely, Norris, and Romiti 2021). As it is well documented that girls tend to be more prone to collaborate and participate in the classroom (Briole 2021;Lindow, Marrett, and Cherry Wilkinson 1985), our tentative assumption is that the gendered peer effects may be slightly different for boys and girls (Anil et al 2016) with a higher proportion of male students in a classroom affecting male students' negative school attitudes in particular.…”