SEMINAR 8 October 2012: Yann Algan, Sciences Po, Paris

Teaching Practices and Social Capital

Abstract

In cross-country data, teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are strongly related to various dimensions of social capital.  We use micro-data from three data sets to investigate the influence of teaching practices on student beliefs about cooperation and student non-cognitive skills.  We first show that teaching practices are strongly correlated with student beliefs across schools within countries.  We then exploit within school and within classroom variation to address omitted variable and reverse causality concerns.  We show that teaching practices have an independent and sizeable effect on student beliefs.  The evidence supports the idea that progressive education promotes the formation of social capital.