Back in July, I wrote a post about how the exposure to foreign-born students affected the academic performance of students in Florida. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of related research on the impact of immigrant students on native-born students. The effect will depend on the characteristics of the immigrant students (e.g. whether they speak the language of instruction; or the education level of their parents) and how teachers respond (e.g. do they change the way that they present material) and how schools respond (e.g. are immigrant students clustered into particular classes).
Identifying the effect of school peers (including immigrant students) on academic performance is quite difficult, mainly because there is a problem of selection bias. Parents often get to choose what school to send their children to. Schools usually get to choose how to allocate students across classrooms, sometimes on the basis of academic merit (often referred to as 'streaming'). These selection effects mean that the observed relationship between academic performance and the number (or proportion) of immigrant peers is going to be biased. Researchers must find some way to deal with the selection bias.
In this 2020 article (open access) by Kelvin Seah (National University of Singapore), published in the journal Australian Economic Review, selection bias is reduced by comparing student performance between two consecutive cohorts of students at the same school. That deals with any selection bias in relation to schools (because the comparison is within schools). Using data from entire school cohorts might deal with class selection issues (although I am not convinced - it simply means that the bias might be positive for some students, and negative for others, but there is no guarantee that it averages out to zero).
Seah uses data from the 1995 TIMSS study, for Australia, Canada, and the United States. This study collected data on maths and science performance for students in seventh and eighth grades. The data set includes over 40,000 students from over 700 schools across the three countries. Measuring exposure to immigrant students as the proportion of non-native-born students in each school cohort, Seah finds that:
There are marked differences in the share of immigrant students to which native students are exposed in the three countries. On average, natives in the Australian sample have the highest share of immigrant peers in their grade level in school while natives in the Canadian sample have the lowest.
Looking at the effects on maths achievement in the TIMSS test, Seah finds that:
For Australia... the maths achievement of native students is positively associated with the share of immigrant peers in the grade... a 10‐percentage point rise in the grade share of immigrants increases native maths achievement by about 0.093 standard deviations (significant at the 5 per cent level)...
For Canada... the share of immigrant students in the grade is negatively associated with natives’ maths achievement (this relationship is statistically significant at the 5 per cent level)... A 10‐percentage point increase in the share of immigrant grade peers is estimated to reduce native maths achievement by 0.048 standard deviations...
For the United States... Once non-random sorting of immigrant and native students across schools is taken into account, the relationship between these variables disappears and the coefficient falls to essentially zero. The result is unaltered when controls for individual, family, and school‐grade characteristics are added...
The results for Australia might seem a little surprising at first, but Seah shows that immigrant children in Australia perform better in maths than native-born children. The results are similar (but the size of the effects are much smaller) for performance in science. Digging a bit deeper into the maths results, Seah finds that:
...the peer effects of immigrant students are more adverse when immigrant students are non‐native speakers of the test language and when they have less‐educated parents. Further, the estimated peer effects of immigrant students attenuate when subject achievement of immigrant students is controlled for, suggesting that peer effects are at least partially working through immigrant students’ achievement.
There's nothing too surprising there. Seah then tries to tie the disparate results for Canada and Australia to the degree of autonomy that teachers have in setting the curriculum, and finds that:
...the results for maths achievement indicate that the peer effects of immigrants are more positive in schools where teachers have a high degree of influence in determining curriculum.
That suggests that, if we want to limit any negative effect of immigrant students on native-born students' achievement, we should allow teachers to better tailor their course offerings for their class. Unfortunately, that is almost the opposite what we might conclude from this 2018 article by Hu Feng (University of Science and Technology Beijing), published in the Journal of Comparative Economics (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online). Feng uses data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), and instead of international migrants, the focus here is on internal migrants. So, at the least, there is unlikely to be much of a language effect in Feng's sample. Interestingly, Chinese middle school students (who are the focus of Feng's study) are mostly allocated to classes either randomly, or using a "balanced assignment rule" (which means that the best and worst students go in one class, the second-best and second-worst in another class, and so on). This random allocation allows Feng to deal with the class selection issue (but I'm not entirely convinced about the absence of school selection, because wealthy parents could opt their children out of public schools).
Feng looks at the effect of migrant peers on performance in maths, Chinese, and English, and finds that:
...the presence of migrant peers in the classroom has negative and statistically significant effects on math scores of local students... a ten-percentage-point increase in the proportion of migrant students in the classroom reduces local students' math test scores by 1.06 points, which is equivalent to 0.11 standard deviations...
...migrant peers have large and negative effects on local students’ Chinese test scores... a ten-percentage-point increase in the proportion of migrant students in the classroom reduces local students’ Chinese test scores by 1.06 points, which is equivalent to 0.11 standard deviations... Finally... migrant peers have negative but relatively small effects on local students’ English test scores.
Feng also finds that the results are larger for male than for female students. They then go on to look at how teachers respond to migrant students. They find that:
...in the classes with higher proportions of migrant students teachers are less likely to use the methods of group discussion and interaction with students, which are usually assumed to better improve students’ cognitive abilities... On the other hand... the presence of migrant students in the classroom has negative effects on the use of relatively advanced teaching media like multi-media projector, Internet, and pictures, models, or posters, which are important for teaching effectiveness.
So, it appears that when teachers have the ability to change the mode of instruction, they do so in ways that make local students worse off, when there are more migrant children in the classroom. This is probably exacerbated by teachers' attitudes, because Feng reports that teachers "prefer to teach classes with fewer migrant students". Unfortunately, Feng's study is silent on whether teachers modify the curriculum in response to the presence of more migrant students.
It is worth noting that the negative effects in these two studies are contrary to the findings of Figlio et al., which I referred to in my earlier post. They found no effect of immigrant exposure on native-born students. This literature is crying out for a meta-analysis at some point. We also need some further studies to unpack the mechanisms, since it is important to better understand whether changing curriculum or teaching modes, or both, to suit immigrant students has a net negative or positive effect overall.
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