Gender Peer Effects on Students’ Academic and Noncognitive Outcomes

On the Mechanisms of Ability Peer Effects

“…A third approach is to control for pre-assignment characteristics that reveal systematic assignment in the preferred specification, thus relying on mean independence of treatment conditional on these characteristics (e.g. Lavy and Schlosser, 2011; Gong, Lu and Song, 2019). This approach is not costly in terms of power and does not require intimate knowledge of the institutional background, yet it assumes (often implicitly) that controlling for characteristics related to systematic assignment fully accounts for related unobserved characteristics that also determine assignment.…”

“…In one study, we cover the vast majority of achievement peer effect mechanisms-hypothesized or tested-in this vast literature (see Table 1). Most previous studies test only a few potential mechanisms for academic peer effects but never more than three or four at a time, and never in a formal mediation analysis (though two other studies, Gong, Lu and Song (2019) and Zölitz and Feld (Forth. ), use mediation analyses to investigate mechanisms behind the effect of classroom peer gender).…”

Behavioral barriers to success in education

“…Similar violations to national mandates are common in similar settings (e.g. Gong et al, 2019;Eble and Hu, 2019). We develop a data-driven procedure to remove schools likely to be defying the mandate of random assignment from our estimation sample and show that data in this trimmed sample is strongly consistent with random assignment.…”

“…A third approach is to control for pre-assignment characteristics that reveal systematic assignment in the preferred specification, thus relying on mean independence of treatment conditional on these characteristics (e.g. Lavy and Schlosser, 2011;Gong et al, 2019). This approach is not costly in terms of power and does not require intimate knowledge of the institutional background, yet it assumes (often implicitly) that controlling for characteristics related to systematic assignment fully accounts for related unobserved characteristics that also determine assignment.…”

“…In one study, we cover the vast majority of achievement peer effect mechanisms-hypothesized or tested-in this vast literature (see Table 3.1). Most previous studies test only a few potential mechanisms for academic peer effects but never more than three or four at a time, and never in a formal mediation analysis (though two other studies, Gong et al (2019) and Zölitz and Feld (Forthcoming), use mediation analyses to investigate mechanisms behind the effect of classroom peer gender). This is an important limitation since the many inputs in the education production function imply equally many mechanisms for peer effects to work through, and the only way to know how well we can explain peer effects is to jointly test all these potential mechanisms.…”