Tamanho da Turma e Desempenho Acadêmico dos Universitários: evidência para a UFPB

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationship between class size and academic performance of higher education students. For that, administrative data from the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB) were used, which contain information such as the students’ grades and the number of students enrolled per class. As an empirical strategy, a panel data model was estimated, with the inclusion of fixed effects and dummies for combinations of teacher-semester and discipline-semester, as a way of capturing the influence of fixed and time variant unobserved factors, in view of the endogeneity of the class size. We use Guimarães and Portugal (2009) for mean estimates and the quantile regression present in Koenker (2004). The coefficient of class size estimated by the mean was negative, although its magnitude is very small, whereas estimates by quantile regression show a negative effect for students with poorer performance and a positive effect on students with better grades.

Keywords
Class Size; Endogeneity; Academic Performance