I’m glad that I haven’t eaten breakfast yet – my empty stomach will be able to accommodate all that crow I’m about to pack in.
I bust on education researchers fairly often. I find flaws in their methodologies, practices and analyses. Though I approach every study as if it is valid before determining otherwise, I’d be lying if I said I thought more of them were useful than were not.
But that all changed when the Stinebrickners turned the education world on its ear.
Todd Stinebrickner, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Economics at The University of Western Ontario has collaborated with Ralph Stinebrickner of Berea College [position unknown] to bring us a study called “The Causal of Effect of Studying on Academic Performance.” Read the abstract:
Despite the large amount of attention that has been paid recently to understanding the determinants of educational outcomes, knowledge of the causal effect of the most fundamental input in the education production function – students’ study time and effort – has remained virtually non-existent. In this paper, we examine the causal effect of studying on grade performance using an Instrumental Variable estimator. Our approach takes advantage of a unique natural experiment and is possible because we have collected unique longitudinal data that provides detailed information about all aspects of this experiment. Important for understanding the potential impact of a wide array of education policies, the results suggest that human capital accumulation is far from predetermined at the time of college entrance.
The basic conclusion: Studying has a positive effect on academic performance.
You can pay $5 for the study over at the National Bureau for Economic Research or you can download it for free from T. Stinebrickner’s website [Adobe PDF, 42pgs, link opens in new window].
Who would fund such a study?
Acknowledgments: The work was made possible by generous funding from The Mellon Foundation, The National Science Foundation, The Social Science Humanities Research Council and support from Berea College. We are very thankful to Anne Kee, Lori Scafidi, Dianne Stinebrickner, Pam Thomas, and Albert Conley who have played invaluable roles in the collection and organization of the data from the Berea Panel Study. The authors would like to thank John Bound, Dan Black, Brian Jacob, Lance Lochner, Jeff Smith, and seminar participants at Northwestern, Maryland, Syracuse, The University of British Columbia, and NBER.
Oh.
Give it a read.
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