Early Years Multi‐grade Classes and Pupil Attainment*
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| Author | Daniel Borbely,Markus Gehrsitz,Stuart McIntyre,Gennaro Rossi,Graeme Roy |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12561 |
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 85, 6 (2023) 0305-9049
doi: 10.1111/obes.12561
Early Years Multi-grade Classes
and Pupil Attainment*
DANIEL BORBELY,† MARKUS GEHRSITZ,‡,§ STUART MCINTYRE,‡
GENNARO ROSSI¶ and GRAEME ROY#
†School of Business, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK(e-mail: DBorbely001@dundee.ac.uk)
‡Fraser of Allander Institute, Department of Economics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
(e-mail: markus.gehrsitz@strath.ac.uk)
§Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany
¶Department of Economics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK(e-mail:
gennaro.rossi@ed.ac.uk)
#College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK(e-mail:
Graeme.Roy@glasgow.ac.uk)
Abstract
We study the effect of exposure to older, more experienced, classroom peers resulting from
the widespread use of multi-grade classes in Scottish primary schools. For identification,
we exploit that a class-planning algorithm quasi-randomly assigns groups of pupils to
multi-grade classes. We find that school-starters benefit from exposure to second-graders
in measures of numeracy and literacy. We do not find any evidence that these gains are
driven by smaller class sizes or more parental input. While short-lived, these benefits
accrue independent of socioeconomic background, to boys and girls alike, and our results
provide no evidence that they come at the expense of older peers from the preceding
cohort.
I. Introduction
Classroom composition and peer effects have been shown to be important determinants of
pupil achievement. Several studies have documented the benefits of classroom exposure
JEL Classification numbers: C36, H52, I21, I26, I28, J24.
*We are grateful to Emma Congreve, Susan Ellis, Gordon McKinlay, Ian Walker and Tanya Wilson as well as to
Antonio Acconcia, Marco Alfano, Maria De Paola, Eric Hanushek, David A. Jaeger, Roberto Nistic´
o, Jonathan
Norris, Jens Ruhose, Elia Sartori and Simon Wiederhold for their helpful comments. The paper has also benefited
from feedback from the Association for Education Finance and Policy’s (AEFP), the European Society for
Population Economics’ (ESPE), the Royal Economic Society’s (RES), the Scottish Economic Society’s (SES),
and the Society of Labor Economists’ (SOLE) 2021 annual conferences, as well as comments at the Centre
for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF) seminar series. We thank Mick Wilson and his team at Scottish
Government for providing the raw data used in this study. We also thank Julian Augley, Fiona James, Suhail
Iqbal, David Stobie, Amy Tilbrook and Dionysis Vragkos from the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data
Research for their assistance in accessing the data used in this study. This project was supported by the Nuffield
Foundation through grant EDO/43743.
1295
©2023 The Authors. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1296 Bulletin
to high-ability peers (Hanushek et al.,2003; Lefgren, 2004; Ding and Lehrer, 2007;
Neidell and Waldfogel, 2010; Lavy, Paserman, and Schlosser, 2012a; Lavy, Silva, and
Weinhardt, 2012b), to female classmates (Hoxby, 2000; Lavy and Schlosser, 2011;
Black, Devereux, and Salvanes, 2013; Anelli and Peri, 2019) and to classmates with
college-educated mothers (Bifulco, Fletcher, and Ross, 2011;Bifulcoet al.,2014)as
well as the adverse effects of disruptive peers (Figlio, 2007; Aizer, 2008; Carrell and
Hoekstra, 2010; Carrell and Hoekstra, 2012; Carrell, Hoekstra, and Kuka, 2018). The
ethnic makeup of classrooms (Angrist and Lang, 2004; Hoxby and Weingarth, 2005;
Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin, 2009; Hanushek and Rivkin, 2009; Fruehwirth, 2013)and
the effect of immigrant peers on natives (Gould, Lavy, and Daniele Paserman, 2009;
Ballatore, Fort, and Ichino, 2018) have also received attention. However, little is known
about a widespread classroom structure that explicitly creates and harnesses peer effects:
multi-grade classes. These are classes comprised of pupils from adjacent grades. For
instance, first-graders being taught alongside second-graders, and thus being exposed to
older, more experienced peers.1
Multi-grade classes are widely used. About 28% of schools in the USA use a mixed
class setup and more than a third of primary school pupils in France attend multi-grade
classes (Leuven and Rønning, 2014). Yet, multi-grade classes have not been widely
studied. A notable exception is Sims (2008) who documents that multi-grade classes were
an unintended consequence of California’s Class Size Reduction Program: to comply with
the new policy and thus qualify for additional funding, schools simply pooled pupils from
adjacent grades into multi-grade classes. He shows that this had a detrimental impact on
the test scores of pupils in multi-grade classes. Recent studies of rural areas of Norway
(Leuven and Rønning, 2014) and Italy (Checchi and De Paola, 2018; Barbetta, Sorrenti,
and Turati, 2019) have built on this work. They exploit that in these rural settings cohorts
are often so small that pooling several year-groups is done out of necessity. With the
exception of Checchi and De Paola (2018), they find that pupils in these schools actually
benefit from attending multi-grade classes.
In shaping policy, decision-makers need to know whether the benefits documented
by this nascent literature translate outside of a rural context or whether –consistent
with Sims (2008) –multi-grade groupings may even have a detrimental impact on pupil
performance. In our study we are able to examine this issue directly because in Scotland,
the subject of this study and a constituent nation of the United Kingdom, multi-grade
classes feature in virtually all primary schools. In fact, they are consciously created in both
rural and urban schools, which allows our study to investigate their impact on attainment
in settings in which the majority of pupils are educated. As such, our study holds important
lessons for both policymakers and education practitioners.
In order to identify the causal effect of multi-grade classes, we exploit that in Scottish
primary schools, an algorithm (‘class planner’) determines the most cost-efficient number,
size, and composition of classes, subject to nationwide minimum and maximum class size
rules. Specifically there are class size limits for single-year classes which vary by grade,
and separate caps for multi-grade classes. The class planner is set up to minimize the
1A related strand of both the education (Slavin, 1987) and economics literature (Betts, 2011) has explored the effects
of ability grouping and academic tracking.
©2023 The Authors. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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