Class size and college students academic performance: evidence for UFPB
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1590/0101-41615014aseKeywords:
Class Size, Endogeneity, Academic PerformanceAbstract
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 dummmies 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 the class size estimated by the mean was statistically non-significant, whereas the
quantile regression estimates show a negative and significant effect for the poorer students and
a positive effect on the students with the best grades.
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Copyright (c) 2020 Ana Cláudia Annegues da Silva, Sabino Porto Júnior, Erik Alencar de Figueiredo
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Atualizado em 14/08/2025