@jonesLONGTERMEFFECTSCOGNITIVE2010

(2010) - Andrew M Jones, Nigel Rice, Pedro Rosa Dias

Journal: Health, Econometrics and Data Group
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Tags:: #paper #NCDS #Health #Transition
Cite Key:: [@jonesLONGTERMEFFECTSCOGNITIVE2010]

Abstract

Members of the National Child Development Study (NCDS) cohort attended very different types of secondary school, as their schooling lay within the transition period of the comprehensive education reform in England and Wales. This provides a natural setting to explore the impact of educational attainment and of school quality on health and healthrelated behaviour later in life. We use a combination of matching methods and parametric regressions to deal with selection effects and to evaluate differences in adult health outcomes and health-related behaviour for cohort members exposed to the old selective and to the new comprehensive educational systems.

Notes

“Members of the National Child Development Study (NCDS) cohort attended very different types of secondary school, as their schooling lay within the transition period of the comprehensive education reform in England and Wales” (Jones et al., 2010)

“We use a combination of matching methods and parametric regressions to deal with selection effects and to evaluate differences in adult health outcomes and health-related behaviour for cohort members exposed to the old selective and to the new comprehensive educational systems.” (Jones et al., 2010)

“They went through secondary schooling during the 1970s and attended very different types of school. The cohort’s secondary schooling lay within the transition period of the comprehensive education reform that was implemented in England and Wales from the mid-1960s” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 1)

“Comprehensive schooling was not implemented simultaneously nationwide, hence some of the cohort members attended the highly selective tri-partite system of state-funded education, which comprised grammar schools, secondary modern schools and a dwindling number of technical schools. Among members of the NCDS cohort, 12 per cent attended grammar schools at age 16, 25 per cent attended secondary moderns and 57 per cent attended comprehensives. A further 6 per cent of NCDS cohort members attended private fee-paying schools, independent of the state educational system and reforms2.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 1)

“We use a matching framework to pre-process the data: using a combination of coarsened exact matching along with propensity score and Mahalanobis matching (Ho et al., 2007). This is important because our own descriptive analysis, as well as previous work with the NCDS, shows an imbalance between the observed pre-schooling characteristics of those who attended comprehensive and selective schools (Pischke and Manning, 2006).” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 2)

“the two systems co-existed for a long period of time and approximately 40 per cent of the NCDS cohort, who entered state secondary schools in 1969, experienced the pre-reform selective system; the remaining 60 per cent attended comprehensive schools.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 4)

“Grammar schools were academically oriented state schools that provided teaching for the entire age range 11-18, including a sixth form for Advanced level (‘A-level’) studies, and prepared pupils to go on to higher education. Admission into these schools was determined by an exam taken at age 11 (the ‘Eleven Plus’)4.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 4)

“Kerckhoff et al. (1996) review a series of LEA case studies and use NCDS data to examine the association between types of secondary schools and exam performance at age 18.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 5)

“uthors find no association between the average academic achievements of pupils in selective and in comprehensive schools.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 5)

“tudy finds that high-ability pupils performed relatively worse and low-ability pupils performed relatively better in comprehensive schools. Jesson (2000) implements a valueadded approach that corroborates most of these results.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 5)

“Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles (2004) investigate the effects of the comprehensive reform on educational outcomes; the data used are from the NCDS and their research strategy is based on matching and instrumental variables estimators. Two instruments ar” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 5)

“6 used for type of schooling: Conservative Party control of the cohort members’ LEA (which the authors claim to be negatively correlated with the probability of attending a comprehensive school, but orthogonal to the educational outcomes) and the share of comprehensive schools in a cohort-member’s LEA.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 6)

“Pischke and Manning (2006) also use NCDS data but they question the main results of earlier work. First, contrary to Kerckhoff et al. (1996), they find that comprehensive areas were systematically poorer and populated by children with lower ability than selective areas.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 6)

“The NCDS allows us to condition on a broad set of pre-treatment factors that reflect early life circumstances, occur prior to secondary schooling, and are not influenced by subsequent educational choices (Dearden et al., 2002).” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 8)

“The NCDS provides measures of cognitive and non-cognitive ability collected before respondents began their secondary schooling. Scores of ability tests taken at age 7 and 11 are available on a series of cognitive dimensions: mathematics, reading, copying designs and general ability. These test scores are highly correlated at the individual level leading to problems with precision in econometric models, due to multicollinearity. To avoid this, we follow Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles (2005) and use principal components analysis to construct a single measure of cognitive ability using the first principal component6. The empirical distributions of these combined scores, for the tests at ages 7 and 11, split by type of secondary school attended at age 16 are presented in Figure 2.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 9) Important to replicate.

“It should be emphasised that the three dimensions of cognitive ability used to construct our index – mathematics, reading and general ability – along with the fact that the index derived from the first principal component gives equal weight to each dimension, mirrors the three elements of the Eleven Plus examination. So the cognitive ability score at age 11 can be viewed as a proxy for performance in the Eleven Plus for those who took the examination” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 9) Pretty important to include.

“Following Carneiro et al. (2007) the score for the Bristol Social Adjustment Guide (BSAG) is used as a measure of social skills. This is a measure of problems with social adjustment at age 11: teachers were asked to report whether the child had problems in twelve behavioural domains such as hostility towards children and adults, anxiety, withdrawal, ‘writing off’ adults, unforthcomingness, depression, restlessness, acceptance by adults, inconsequential behaviour, as well as miscellaneous psychological and nervous symptoms (Stott, 1987).” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 10)

“Data on the cohort members’ UK standard region is available for all the waves of the study” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 11)

“For the years 1971 and 1981, NCDS survey data was linked to the Census, allowing a detailed demographic and socioeconomic characterisation of each individual’s local area, at the electoral constituency level, local education authority level and census enumeration district level (the smallest unit for which census statistics were then available, with an average population of about 500) 8.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 11)

“The usual practice, in the literature that uses the NCDS, has been to differentiate individuals according to broad categories of educational attainment: Certificates of Secondary Education (CSE), Olevels, A-levels and university degree or equivalent” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 12)

“CSEs and O-level (Ordinary levels) were secondary education qualifications corresponding, typically, to 11 years of education; CSEs were academically less demanding than O-levels. A-levels (Advanced levels) are a qualification which corresponds to 13 years of education. Completion of Alevels is ordinarily a prerequisite for university admission.” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 12)

“This classification is augmented by information on the characteristics of the school, including the teacher/pupil ratio, the ratio of expelled pupils to the total number, and indicators of whether the school was single sex and whether classes were streamed by ability (see Dearden et al., 2002). It is these measures that are used to capture quality of schooling in the regression models12” (Jones et al., 2010, p. 13)