Grant explores increasing the upward mobility of students

What if you discovered that the majority of students at your school did poorly on standardized tests? Would you prefer to attend a school with a higher-performing student body? Current data suggests that most people would switch schools when given this type of relevant information. Unfortunately, for people in lower-income groups, it’s not so easy to access this data. The repercussions of this are long lasting for education experiences, jobs, and future earning potential.

As principal investigator Yan Chen will conduct the first experiment investigating information acquisition and provision in the context of school choice. Her research will be funded by a $10,000 award from the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics. Chen’s grant “Information Acquisition and Provision in School Choice” will evaluate how people acquire metrics about various schools and provide insight into how policies could reduce inequality and, subsequently, increase the upward mobility of students from low-income families. 

Chen and her team will be testing their hypotheses in a laboratory setting with 12 participants. They want to understand the implications when someone faces expensive barriers to acquiring information. They will then determine how to incentivize students and their families to acquire data on schools that could directly impact the family’s choice of attending a school where more students receive high test scores.

- UMSI News Service