Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/302662 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 17145
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Schools are ripe for policy intervention. We demonstrate that a greater prevalence of group discussion used in schools positively affects students' life satisfaction and noncognitive skills but has no impact on test scores, based on a sample from the 2015 PISA which includes more than 35 thousand students from approximately 1500 schools in 14 countries. We perform regressions of student life satisfaction on school-level group discussion and lecturing, including a battery of controls and random intercepts by school. For robustness we use instrumental variables and methods to account for school-selection. The impact of group discussion is meaningful – a one-standard-deviation increase leads to an increase in life satisfaction that is about one-half of the negative-association with grade repetition. In contrast, lecturing does not have any effects. We are the first to show group discussion improves student life satisfaction and noncognitive skills, and thereby likely positively affects later-life outcomes.
Subjects: 
participatory teaching
test scores
noncognitive skills
teaching practices
subjective well-being
horizontal teaching
JEL: 
I21
I31
J24
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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