Which Teaching Practices Improve Student Performance on High-Stakes Exams? Evidence from Russia

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between teaching practices aimed at raising student performance on a high stakes college entrance examination — the Russian Unified State Exam (USE) — and student performance on that test. The study uses data from a school/classroom survey of almost 3,000 students conducted in 2010 in three Russian regions. The analysis employs a student fixed effects method that estimates the impact of teaching practices used by students’ mathematics and Russian language teachers on students’ exam results. To test for possible heterogeneous effects of practices in different academic tracks, the study estimates the practices’ effect on USE scores for students in advanced and basic level tracks. The study finds that the only strategy with positive effects on test outcomes is greater amounts of subject-specific homework geared to different types of test items, and that the most effective type of homework differs across tracks.

Keywords: teaching practices, curriculum, student achievement, selection bias, student fixed effect, high-stakes examinations

JEL Classification: I21