Poster #80 - Relative Skills in the Classroom: Teachers' Gender-Differentiated Impacts on Students’ Academic and Non-Cognitive Outcomes

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

The gender gap in academic performance increases as students progress through school; girls outperform boys by large and increasing margins in teacher-assigned course grades and standardized reading tests, and eventually surpass boys in standardized math tests. I investigate if and how teachers affect these patterns, focusing on their gender-differentiated impacts on course grades and standardized test scores in each subject. Using administrative data from North Carolina, I estimate value-added measures of teacher effectiveness for fifth-grade teachers, separately for test scores and course grades, and examine their heterogeneous impacts on boys' and girls' middle school outcomes. I find that teachers with high value-added in test scores disproportionately benefit girls (particularly in math), while teachers with high value-added in course grades disproportionately benefit boys (particularly in reading). These patterns are consistent with a two-factor model in which test scores (course grades) are relatively intensive in cognitive (non-cognitive) skills - and observed gender gaps imply a relative proficiency in cognitive (non-cognitive) skills for boys (girls). Under this framework, teachers improve students most along the dimension where the students have a relative deficiency. This interpretation differs from explanations centered on role-model effects or teacher bias, suggesting that gender-differentiated teacher impacts reflect how teachers' strengths interact with students' underlying skill mixes.

Author

• Gagandeep Sachdeva, University of California, Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author