Can Regression Discontinuity Help Answer an Age-Old Question in Education? The Effect of Age on Elementary and Secondary School Achievement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Single-date school entry systems create large age differences between children in the same grade. Older students have been shown in the literature to outperform younger students along many elementary school outcomes, and some post-schooling outcomes. Little evidence exists about the size of these advantages in high school. Data from British Columbia, Canada are used to estimate the effect of age on test scores in grades 4, 7, and 10. I estimate that older students still have a sizable skill advantage in grade 10 across numeracy, reading, and writing tests. The advantage is strongest for girls and low-income students. The results suggest a certain degree of permanence to age related skill differences, which may spill over and affect adult outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.043 | 0.214 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".