Florida State U economist to speak on Mon 4/6 about the impact of gifted education programs.

Monday April 6th at 4:00 p.m. in Hepburn 105, Patrick Ryan Murphy, Department of Economics, Florida State University, will present "The Impact of Gifted Education Programs on Student Achievement."

Abstract :  The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence on the effect of gifted education programs on student achievement. In theory, the impact that gifted education programs ave on participants is made up of several factors. It is important to distinguish the effect of the program itself, the gifted teacher effect, and the peer effects of grouping the gifted together. The goal of this paper is to decompose the total impact into each of these individual parts in order to determine what factors are most important for the ffectiveness of gifted programs. This is made possible by utilizing a very rich single district dataset that links all students and teachers to specific classrooms. A major challenge to studying the benefits of gifted programs is the inherent selection problem associated with participation; only highly talented students receive the treatment. I propose to overcome this problem by focusing on the within-student learning gains that occur before and during participation in the gifted education program, using a fixedeffects multiple regression approach.