School Brown Bag: Yoshi Morozumi

Title:  Should school-level results of national assessments be made public? (with Ryuichi Tanaka)

 Abstract: How national standardized assessments should be designed has been debated extensively. This paper contributes to this debate by examining empirically how the public disclosure of information on school-level assessment scores impacts student outcomes. To this end, we highlight the policy reform in Japan in 2014, whereby the Ministry of Education granted each municipality the discretion to decide whether to make assessment results of each school within the municipality public. Utilizing the resulting variations in the information disclosure system across municipalities, we show that the disclosure of school-level test scores increases students' average test scores, without increasing the dispersion of individual scores among students. Inspecting the mechanism, schools under accountability pressure make better use of diagnostic information from assessments to improve teaching quality. Analysis further reveals that publishing school-level results could also enhance students' non-cognitive skills.

Paper (.pdf)

Lunch will be provided from 12.30pm.