IZA DP No. 17145: Effects of Teaching Practices on Life Satisfaction and Test Scores: Evidence from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Schools are ripe for policy intervention. We demonstrate that a greater prevalence of group discussion used in schools positively affects students' life satisfaction and noncognitive skills but has no impact on test scores, based on a sample from the 2015 PISA which includes more than 35 thousand students from approximately 1500 schools in 14 countries. We perform regressions of student life satisfaction on school-level group discussion and lecturing, including a battery of controls and random intercepts by school. For robustness we use instrumental variables and methods to account for school-selection. The impact of group discussion is meaningful – a one-standard-deviation increase leads to an increase in life satisfaction that is about one-half of the negative-association with grade repetition. In contrast, lecturing does not have any effects. We are the first to show group discussion improves student life satisfaction and noncognitive skills, and thereby likely positively affects later-life outcomes.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.