Poster #108 - Teachers' Impacts on Test Scores, Grades, and Gender Gaps in Elementary and Middle School

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

Persistent gender gaps in academic achievement remain a critical concern for educators and policymakers. While substantial research has examined mathematics achievement, where boys typically outperform girls, less attention has been paid to reading achievement, where boys consistently lag behind girls, with gaps that manifest in elementary school and persist through higher education. These disparities are particularly concerning given growing evidence that reading proficiency is a crucial determinant of educational attainment and future labor market outcomes. Reading skills play a significant role in explaining college enrollment, suggesting that gender gaps in reading achievement may be a key driver of broader educational attainment disparities between males and females.

Teachers can have lasting impacts across multiple dimensions of student development, through both cognitive outcomes measured by test scores and non-cognitive outcomes captured by teacher-assigned grades, absences, and classroom behaviors. While teachers' impacts on non-cognitive measures is an important and growing area of research, their gender-differentiated impacts on non-cognitive skills remain under-explored. Given that boys systematically lag behind girls in non-cognitive skills, in addition to cognitive reading skills, understanding how teachers differentially impact male and female students’ reading skills in both dimensions could provide important insights for addressing these persistent gender gaps.

In my job market paper, I investigate the gender-differentiated impacts of teachers on students’ reading skills in both cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions, using a teacher value-added approach with administrative data from North Carolina. My analysis is motivated by three key descriptive findings. First, between grades 3 and 8, girls on average outperform boys in reading test scores by 0.06 to 0.12 standard deviations. While boys begin 3rd grade with higher cognitive math scores than girls, this gap closes by middle school and flips by grade 8. Second, I document substantial disparities in course grades: boys consistently lag behind girls (conditional on test scores) across both math and reading, and these gaps persist. For reading grades, the conditional gender gap grows from 0.09 SD in 3rd grade to 0.33 SD in 8th grade. Third, using gender-differentiated value-added measures, I find that teachers with higher overall value-added tend to have greater boy-specific effectiveness in grade value-added. This pattern does not emerge in test scores, suggesting a unique relationship between teacher effectiveness and non-cognitive outcomes by gender.

To investigate these patterns, I adapt the approach of Chetty et al. (2014) to allow for heterogeneous effects of the same teacher on boys and girls. I find that teachers who raise test scores generate persistent gains in both outcomes, while those who improve grades do not produce lasting effects. Teachers who improve reading scores also contribute to closing the gender gap in reading, and this effect is weakly persistent. Together, these results highlight that addressing gender gaps in reading may require a more nuanced understanding of how teacher effectiveness operates across student groups and outcome types.

Author

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