Addressing Inequalities in High School Track Choice

Last registered on January 23, 2023

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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Addressing Inequalities in High School Track Choice

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0010758

Initial registration date

January 12, 2023

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

January 23, 2023, 6:02 AM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country

Italy

Region

Primary Investigator

Name

Michela Carlana

Affiliation

Harvard Kennedy School

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Francesca Miserocchi

PI Affiliation

Harvard University

Contact Investigator

PI Name

Eleonora Patacchini

PI Affiliation

Bocconi University

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

On going

Start date

2022-11-08

End date

2024-08-31

Keywords

Education

Additional Keywords

inequality, bias, teachers

JEL code(s)

I24, J15, D90

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.

Abstract

In most OECD countries characterized by tracking, high-school choice is highly segregated by socioeconomic status (SES). Using rich administrative data on the population of Italian students, we document stark SES gaps in high-school track choice that mirrors track recommendations by teachers. Students from low SES are less likely to be recommended (and choose) top-tier high school tracks compared to students from high SES with the same standardized test scores and grades, with potentially negative implications for upward mobility of disadvantaged students. Why are low SES students recommended to lower tracks compared to students from high SES with similar performance? If teachers became aware of the bias in their recommendations, would they change their behavior?
The intent of this research is twofold. First, we aim at understanding the determinants of SES gaps in teachers' track recommendations through a combination of surveys and experiments with teachers, investigating the role of (i) biased beliefs about their own past recommendations, (ii) biased beliefs about future gaps in academic performance and returns to different tracks by students' SES. Second, we evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention that provides information to teachers on the bias in their past recommendations. Specifically, teachers in control schools receive only general information about the academic performance in high school of their past students, while teachers in the treatment group receive additional information about the gap in their track recommendations by students' SES. We will evaluate the impact of this intervention on teachers' track recommendations and on students' choices.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Carlana, Michela, Francesca Miserocchi and Eleonora Patacchini. 2023. "Addressing Inequalities in High School Track Choice." AEA RCT Registry. January 23. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.10758-1.0

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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

Intervention (Hidden)

We implement the following interventions:

(1) Experiment in teacher survey. We show a series of vignettes with hypothetical students' profiles to teachers and ask them to provide a track recommendation for these hypothetical students. We randomize students' gender and SES status across vignettes to study if they affect teachers' recommendations. We implement two teachers' online surveys: the baseline survey was sent by email to the official school email address in November to recruit the teachers. The second survey will be sent by email to the recruited teachers, through the email address they provided in the first questionnaire.

(2) Information intervention at the school level. Between November 27 and December 17, teachers in treatment and control schools received a personalized report with aggregate statistics about the performance in high school of their past students, along with the province and national average. All teachers received information about their past students' average grades in math, Italian, and English in high school, the average share of students admitted in grade 10, and the average number of subjects in which they failed in grade 9. They also received information about these outcomes separately for students who followed and did not follow their track recommendation, and for students who chose different high school tracks. In addition to this information, teachers in treatment schools received information about inequality in their past track recommendations. In particular, they were shown the percentage of students that they recommended to each track by students' SES; the same statistics were shown separately for students with high and low GPA. Moreover, they were shown their believed and actual share of students from low SES assigned to the high tracks, and the actual performance in high school of students with high GPA in middle school but different SES. The individualized reports were sent to teachers via email. We will evaluate the impact of this intervention on teachers' track recommendations and students' choices. We chose to randomize at the school level rather than at the teacher level in order to avoid contamination between teachers who received the additional information on inequality in recommendations by SES.

Intervention Start Date

2022-11-27

Intervention End Date

2022-12-23

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

The outcomes will include:
(1) administrative outcomes on students' high school track choice and teachers' track recommendations
(2) data collected from a teachers' questionnaire that will be implemented in January-February 2023, including teachers' beliefs about their own track recommendations, teachers' beliefs on students' future performance in high school and return to schooling by SES, self-reported track recommendations for their students, and track recommendations for hypothetical students' profiles.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Information intervention with teachers and lab-in-the-field experiment in teachers' survey.

Experimental Design Details

We plan to study how receiving information about inequality in their own track recommendations affects teachers' recommendations for their current students, as well as subsequent students' choices. Teachers provide track recommendations to their students between mid-November and mid-December, depending on their school. Due to time constraints, some teachers received the personalized reports after their school had assigned the track recommendations. We will account for this in the analysis, as we expect to find a smaller effect in schools in which teachers already assigned the track recommendation.

Randomization Method

Randomization done in office by a computer.

Randomization Unit

The unit of randomization is the school.

Was the treatment clustered?

Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

85 schools

Sample size: planned number of observations

Around 4,000 pupils, 600 teachers.

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

Around 2,000 students and 300 teachers in each of the treatment arms

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

Considering ICC of 0.07, 85 schools, 40 students per school, the MDE is 0.185 SD or 0.085 in terms of percentage points change assuming 20% of students are recommended toward a top-tier track. In case of promising results, we plan to expand the scale of the project during the school year 2024-25.

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB