Better Relationship With Teacher, Better Performance? Causal Evidence From Chinese Middle Schools (Poster 9)

• In Event: AERA Poster Session One
  In Poster Session: Cognitive and Motivational Processes: Poster Session One

Abstract

Whether classroom teacher-student relationships have causal impacts on student learning is of policymaker, educator, and researcher’s great interest. I leverage the random assignment of teachers to students in Chinese middle schools to isolate an exogenous proportion of variation in TSR and estimate TSR causal effects on student performance. I found that, a one third of increase in positive TSR improves student English score by 0.7 standard deviation (SD), confidence in learning Chinese by approximately one SD, and confidence in learning English by slightly more than one SD. These findings are robust across three different model specifications and two alternative samples. Placebo tests on an adjacent outcome (cognitive test score) adds evidence that my identification strategy does not have overidentification issues.

Author

• Congli Zhang, University of Oregon
  Presenting Author