Trading the Television for a Textbook?: High School Exit Exams and Student Behavior
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Timothy M. Diette
und
Sara E. Helms
Abstract
Approximately half of the states in the United States have some form of high school exit exam. One purpose of the exit exams is to create a clear bar which students must pass in order to graduate. Effective exit exams may encourage marginal students to spend additional time on schooling in order to pass the exam. This study exploits state-level variations in timing of implementation to understand how students have responded to the state exit exams. This study uses the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). The ATUS captures, in detail, how individuals spend their day. We find that exit exams are associated with an increase in the amount of time that students spend on educational activities by almost 20 minutes per day in the months in which exams are typically given. The increase comes mainly from an increase in time spent in school and not time spent outside of school on education-related activities. The additional time for education appears to be a trade-off with time spent watching television, which shows a significant drop in exam months for students facing exams.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of the International Perspectives on Time Use Conference participants, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management conference participants, seminar participants at the University of Virginia and Samford University, Jacob Vigdor, Daniel Hamermesh, Kristin Klopfenstein, Sarah Turner, Charlene Kalenkoski, Jessica Howell, Jay Stewart, Rebecca Ryan, and the anonymous reviewers. The research was supported by the Lenfest Summer Fellowship. Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.
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- 1
See Chapter 7 of the American Time Use Survey User’s Guide: Understanding ATUS 2003–2011 for more information. It is available at http://www.bls.gov/tus/atususersguide.pdf.
- 2
These students would not be captured by our analysis as we only include 15- to 18-year-old individuals who report being high school students.
- 3
We find that family income matters in a predictable way – an additional $1,000 increases student time on education by 0.3 minutes per day. Controlling for all other factors, we find that minority students spend less time, on average, on educational activity, but that students living in a metropolitan area spend more time on it.
- 4
In contrast, we find that most of the effect of demographic control variables operates through out-of-school educational activities. Intuitively, this makes sense, as out-of-school activity is more likely to be influenced by family characteristics instead of state policy.
- 5
We also estimated the model using switcher states only. That is, we included only those seven states which had observations both before and after the implementation of an exit exam. We do not include the results, but they are available upon request. When we do not include state fixed effects, we find that, using states with a change in policy, students facing an exit exam spend an additional 72 minutes on educational activity during testing months, relative to students who do not face an exit exam, but who are also observed during testing months. In-school educational activity accounts for 47 of those minutes. Once we include state fixed effects, no policy estimate maintains statistical significance, though the magnitude of the effect is consistent with other specifications (32 additional minutes on all educational activity and 27 additional minutes on in-school educational activity).
- 6
In contrast to our findings in Table 3, when we focus on switcher states only we find that in addition to more minutes spent on in-school educational activity (not statistically significant), we also find an approximately 30-minute increase in out-of-school educational activity during typical testing months for students facing exit exams. Our results using switcher states only are available upon request.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin / Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Advances
- Preferential Admission and MBA Outcomes: Mismatch Effects by Race and Gender
- Quantity Uncertainty and Demand: The Case of Water Smart Reader Ownership
- Contributions
- Employment Effects of the 2009 Minimum Wage Increase: New Evidence from State-Based Comparisons of Workers by Skill Level
- Introducing Carbon Taxes in Russia: The Relevance of Tax-Interaction Effects
- Estimating Parents’ Valuations of Class Size Reductions Using Attrition in the Tennessee STAR Experiment
- Local Option, Alcohol and Crime
- To Work or Not to Work? The Effect of Childcare Subsidies on the Labour Supply of Parents
- Understanding Ransom Kidnappings and Their Duration
- Screening Stringency in the Disability Insurance Program
- Sticks and Carrots in Procurement: An Experimental Exploration
- Peer Effects and Policy: The Relationship between Classroom Gender Composition and Student Achievement in Early Elementary School
- Topics
- Competition and Innovation in Product Quality: Theory and Evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia
- Trading the Television for a Textbook?: High School Exit Exams and Student Behavior
- The Effect of Parental Migration on the Educational Attainment of Their Left-Behind Children in Rural China
- Do Parents’ Social Skills Influence Their Children’s Sociability?
- The Role of Infrastructure in Mitigating Poverty Dynamics: The Case of an Irrigation Project in Sri Lanka
- Congestion of Academic Journals Under Papers’ Imperfect Selection
- Endogenous Merger with Learning
- Do Low-Skilled Migrants Contribute More to Home Country Income? Evidence from South Asia
- The Minimum Wage and Crime
