Essays on external influences on academic achievement: evidence from political unrest and severe floods in Thailand
Date
2017
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Since 2006 at least 843 protests have occurred in 87 countries (Ortiz et al. 2013). My first essay examines the impact of political protests on student achievement. The chief conceptual difficulty in identifying the effect of protests on student achievement is their non-random nature. To address this problem, I exploit the political protests in Thailand in 2008 and 2010 as quasi-experiments to measure their effect on the national examination, the O-net, conditional on school fixed effects. The estimates suggest that the protests had a negative and significant effect on all test scores except for the mathematics test scores, perhaps because students were able to study mathematics more easily outside of school. The absolute sizes of the change in test score as a result of the protests range from 0.05 to 0.14 standard deviations, depending on the subject. ☐ Over 300 natural disasters affected more than 140 million people in 2014 (Guha-Sapir, Below, and Hoyois 2016). My second essay examines the impact of severe flooding on student achievement. By using a difference-in-differences strategy, I exploit the severe flooding in Thailand in 2011 as a natural experiment to measure its effect on the national examination, the O-net. The estimates suggest that the flood had a negative and significant effect on all test scores for grade 6, except for social studies. In addition, for grade 9 the flood had a negative and significant effect on all test scores. But, for grade 12 the flood had no significant effect on test scores, except for social studies. The absolute sizes of the change in test score as a result of the flood range from 0.03 to 0.11 standard deviations, depending on the subject and level.
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Keywords
Social sciences, Health and environmental sciences, Education, Flood, Natural experiment, Political protest, Student achievement, Thailand