Department of Economics graduate student Juan Marguia will present Thursday's Human Resource Workshop entitled "Learning to build and use social networks: Losing kindergarten classmates affects 1st grade success." The seminar will take place on Thursday, September 8th from 4pm-5:15 pm, in 468D Heady Hall.

Abstract: There is a large literature on the effect of class size, teacher experience and peers effect, on education performance that analyzed data from the Tennessee Project STAR, (see Schansenbach (2006) for a review). Program STAR was a longitudinal large scale randomized experiment on kindergarten to third grade class size effects. This paper analyzes kindergarten network effects on fist grade performance.

Using a sample of 3228 students that were in Project STAR during kindergarten and first grade and exploiting the fact that students were randomly assigned to classes, the probability of passing first grade is estimated. I find that keeping more kindergarten classmates increases the probability of passing first grade, controlling for network quality change among other variables. Peers effect in its traditional measure is also present given improvements in classmates SAT scores from kindergarten (gk) to first grade (g1) are significantly positive.  Student’s abilities, race and gender have significant effects in the same direction found in previous studies of tests performance. Some surprising results are that less experienced teachers (younger) in kindergarten and more experienced in first grade (older) increase the probability of passing g1; and class size effects are positive for gk and negative for g1.