Experiments in Educational Settings
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 4, 2025 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM (PST)
- Chair: Laura K. Gee, Tufts University
Discrimination through Biased Memory
Abstract
This paper shows that decision-makers make more stereotypical decisions when they struggle to recall individual-level information, penalizing women in male-dominated fields. Analyzing administrative data from Italian schools, I find that when teachers need to assess a larger number of students, girls are less likely to be recommended for top-tier scientific high school tracks compared to boys with the same math standardized scores. However, this bias vanishes for teachers who report checking student data in class registers, relying less on memory alone. To directly assess the extent to which limitations and biases in recall generate more stereotypical decisions, I conducted two experiments. In the first, teachers provided track recommendations for a series of student profiles. When teachers cannot check individual data and must rely on memory, they recall a limited set of individual signals and disproportionately retrieve stereotype-consistent information (i.e. poor math performance if the student is a girl). As a consequence, large gender-based disparities in decisions emerge, with girls 39% less likely to be recommended to STEM tracks than identical boys. Eliminating memory constraints by allowing teachers to check individual-level information reduces the gender gap by 80%, mitigating the misallocation of talent. A second large-scale online experiment generalizes this mechanism. Taken together, the results highlight how memory limitations and biases amplify discriminatory behaviors and suggest that simple, cost-effective interventions facilitating access to individual-level information can mitigate such biases.Gender Salience and Communication in Teams
Abstract
This paper presents experimental evidence that gender salience affects communication in mixed-gender teams. In a laboratory experiment with a real-effort task in a university setting, I find that making gender more salient causes men to speak significantly more and women to speak significantly less in a chat-based setting. This leads to a significant increase in imbalanced communication in mixed-gender teams, as compared to same-gender pairings. Despite these imbalances in communication, I find that mixed-gender teams perform better on the task than same-gender pairings, highlighting the importance of team diversity in collaborative environments.Gendered Perceptions of the Economics Degree: Evidence from High School and College Students
Abstract
The economics discipline is dominated by men, but research implies that simple low cost informational interventions can impact students’ interest in economics. Our ongoing study explores the early-stage nuanced beliefs, information, and biases students have about economics that could be addressed by improved information saliency about the discipline. Unlike previous work, our study includes samples of not only early-stage college students, but also high school juniors and seniors. In our survey, we collect detailed demographic information, how much key factors influence major choice (such as salary, societal impact, job stability, etc.), where and to what extent students have been exposed to economics (classes, media, etc.), their likelihood of taking economics classes and becoming an economics major or minor in the future, and what careers they believe economics majors pursue. We also collect data on what students perceive to be barriers to studying economics (such as the math is too difficult or the topics are uninteresting), what opinions and/or biases they have about the discipline, and what economics topics are most interesting to them (policy design, economic inequality, behavioral economics and decision making, etc). This rich data allows us to answer questions such as whether women have lower confidence in their ability to perform well in economics (lower self-efficacy), to what extent mathematics and other concerns deters students from economics, whether students accurately understand (or misunderstand) the types of jobs economics majors can get and the usefulness of the skills learned in an economics major, and whether there are gendered patterns in concerns about the discipline (such as its perceived focus on the stock market and finance). We will use this data to design an informational intervention implemented through a theory-informed RCT to recruit more diverse students, particularly women, to economics classes and majors.Motivated Beliefs on the Return to Education: A Field Experiment from Rural China
Abstract
This study investigates the impact of information on students' beliefs regarding educational returns and occupational prospects. We conducted a field experiment involving middle school students in rural China, providing them with data on the returns to education. Additionally, we presented the education-level distribution of five major occupations to half of the students. The timing of when updated beliefs and choices were elicited varied, occurring either immediately or three weeks later. Our results show that for high school degree or above students adjust under-estimations of the return to education more than over-estimations. Furthermore, students' initial beliefs and adjustments of self-earning estimates are based on initial beliefs and adjustments of population averages. Importantly, information about the distribution of occupations by education level significantly affects plans for post-middle school education.JEL Classifications
- J1 - Demographic Economics
- I2 - Education and Research Institutions