Centre for Economic and Regional Studies Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence

Start: 02/23/2017 14:00

End: 02/23/2017 16:00

Location: Budapest XI., Budaörsi út 45. VIII/807. (conference room)

Description

Joris Ghysels /TIER, Maastricht University, the Netherlands /
The effect of summer schools on grade retention in Dutch secondary education:
A regression discontinuity approach

Abstract
This paper evaluates the effectiveness of summer schools as an instrument to reduce grade retention in Dutch secondary education. A summer school is an intensive remedial teaching intervention during regular holiday periods intended to avert grade retention. They are built on the literature suggesting high social and individual costs of grade retention and they focus on students with only few learning problems for whom a short, intensive intervention is assumed to be helpful. A summer school lasts between one and two weeks and focuses at one to three subjects.
We use school rules regarding grade retention as assignment variables in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design on a large dataset of students (N= 30,174 with 1,855 participants of summer schools). We evaluate whether participation in the summer school effectively reduces a students’ likelihood of repeating a grade and whether they obtain adequate marks in the following schoolyear. We find evidence that summer schools reduce grade retention, but we find no effects on later marks. These findings cast doubt on the longer term effectiveness of this policy intervention in its current form.