Simon Calmar Andersen

Many studies on candidate choice and other political preferences suggest that the effect of one attribute may mask the effect of another attribute, which the respondent has no information about. If, for instance, respondents lack information about party membership, they may infer that female candidates are Democrats, which would lead to biased estimates of the pure effect of candidate gender. We propose an alternative explanation—namely that respondents have lexicographic preferences—and we present an empirical test using conjoint experiments to distinguish between what we call pure masking and lexicographic preferences. We illustrate our method using data on the effect of gender, race, and party in candidate choice and replicate the results in a preregistered conjoint experiment. We offer recommendations for researchers studying candidate and political choices.

Although many educational programs have demonstrated the potential to increase student learning, few examples of successful scaling exist. We study the scalability of a home-based reading program that has shown promising results in an experiment within a local government. Using a nationwide experiment among the full population of 2^nd-grade children in Danish public schools (n=51,312), we find that the intervention is less effective at large scale. We provide evidence on potential explanations for the lack of scalability, which suggests that low levels of take-up among both schools and parents were the most important barriers to successful scaling.

Understanding which political candidates are elected for office is fundamental to democracy and political science. Whereas there is much agreement that party affiliation is one of the most important candidate characteristics to voters, evidence regarding the gender and race of the candidate is mixed. We suggest voters have lexicographic preferences, meaning they rank their preferences and focus primarily on the candidate's party affiliation. Second-order preferences such as gender and race are mostly necessary when there is a tie in first-order preferences when voters choose between two same-party candidates or have no party information. We show how conjoint experiments can be used to test for lexicographic preferences and use data from a US-representative sample and a pre-registered replication to confirm that in the United States, gender and race are second-order preferences. Lexicographic preferences provide a theoretical lens explaining some of the mixed results of gender and race in the candidate literature.

Proponents describe field experiments as the golden standard for evaluating the effect of public policies. Sceptics argue that the method of experiments would not be ethically defendable, or that politically it would be a dead end since no politicians would put the faith of their policies in the hands of rigorous research methods often waiting years for an answer. Despite these concerns, the use of policy field experiments within the social sciences has witnessed a great increase in recent years. This chapter describes the potentials and pitfalls of using experiments to evaluate public policies. It provides some illustrative examples of such evaluations and discusses the ethical principles that are important to consider when doing social science research in general and field experiments in particular. The chapter concludes with a list of recommendations for the future use of experiments to guide the development of public policies.

With an increasing number of immigrant children in many countries, questions of how to prepare them for further education become highly salient. Few studies have examined the effect of first-language instruction on children’s engagement in school and how that may later transfer into better majority-language outcomes. A randomized controlled trial in Denmark (n = 230) took an asset-based approach to students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. We found that first-language instruction of majority-language learners (average age 7.1 years) reduced their behavioural problems in school and increased their school satisfaction and their parents’ engagement. We saw no immediate effect on their spoken first-language skills, but one year after the intervention ended, their reading skills in the majority language were substantially improved. Half of this improvement could be explained by reduced behavioural problems. The results thereby indicate that an asset-based approach to students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds can help to ensure that first-language instruction transfers into majority-language skills.

Children's educational outcomes are strongly correlated with their parents' educational attainment. This finding is often attributed to the family environment-assuming, for instance, that parents' behavior and resources affect their children's educational outcomes. However, such inferences of a causal role of the family environment depend on the largely untested assumption that such relationships do not simply reflect genes shared between parent and child. We examine this assumption with an adoptee design in full-population cohorts from Danish administrative data. We test whether parental education predicts children's educational outcomes in both biological and adopted children, looking at four components of the child's educational development: (I) the child's conscientiousness during compulsory schooling, (II) academic performance in those same years, (III) enrollment in academically challenging high schools, and (IV) graduation success. Parental education was a substantial predictor of each of these child outcomes in the full population. However, little intergenerational correlation in education was observed in the absence of genetic similarity between parent and child-that is, among adoptees. Further analysis showed that what links adoptive parents' education did have with later-occurring components such as educational attainment (IV) and enrollment (III) appeared to be largely attributable to effects identifiable earlier in development, namely early academic performance (II). The primary nongenetic mechanisms by which education is transmitted across generations may thus have their effects on children early in their educational development, even as the consequences of those early effects persist throughout the child's educational development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Following the publication of the Big Five Inventory- 2 (BFI-2) and its abbreviated forms (the 30-item BFI-2-S and 15-item BFI-2-XS), two studies were conducted to develop and validate a Danish translation of these measures. Study 1 first developed a preliminary Danish BFI-2 item pool consisting of translations of the 60 BFI-2 items, then tested and refined this item pool using two waves of data collection, and identified a set of 60-item formulations for the Danish BFI-2. Study 1 then examined the domain- and facet-level structure of the Danish BFI-2, and the construct validity and reliability of this measure. Study 2 tested the generalizability of the measurement properties of the Danish BFI-2 found in Study 1 as well as the preliminary measurement properties of its abbreviated forms (the Danish BFI-2-S and BFI-2-XS) in a new sample. The results of these studies indicate that the Danish BFI-2 is a reliable and valid personality measure with psychometric properties and construct validity corresponding to the English-language original. The preliminary results regarding measurement properties of the abbreviated forms are encouraging and should inspire further validation.

“Early intervention” has been a mantra in recent debates about human capital investment. Strong theoretical models motivate this focus by predicting that investment in children is most cost‐effective when they are young. The “Heckman curve” summarizes this idea visually (Heckman, 2006). However, hardly any reviews scrutinize this hypothesis empirically in modern welfare states such as those in Scandinavia that already invest heavily during early childhood. Any such review is ideally based on interventions conducted as randomized controlled trials (RCTs), set in the same welfare state, and comparable across ages through cost‐standardized effects. This meta‐analysis assembles cost‐standardized effect estimates from 10 RCTs, including a total of 18 intervention arms and 30,578 participants (aged 1.5–24 years), conducted by the same research center in the Scandinavian welfare state of Denmark. These interventions show significant effects relative to their costs, despite the large baseline investment level. Interventions targeted at younger children tend to produce larger effects, consistent with the Heckman curve. However, variation in the effect size within age groups is as large as it is across age groups. This indicates that both the quality and timing of investments matter and that “early interventions” are not necessarily superior to later interventions.

A large‐scale, cluster‐randomized controlled field trial (N_classrooms = 47; N_students = 1,013) assessed the impact of a digital text‐to‐speech reading material that supported 8‐year‐olds’ decoding and reading comprehension. An active control group used the most prevalent Danish learning material with a research‐based systematic, explicit phonics approach supporting primarily decoding. The digital tool allows children to read unfamiliar text for meaning. Students are supported in mapping between orthography and phonology by three levels of text‐to‐speech support and in identifying spelling patterns. The risk of students overusing text‐to‐speech was countered by postponing access to having words read aloud by directing students towards identifying and training relevant orthographic patterns before activating text‐to‐speech. Results showed no statistically significant difference in decoding, but treatment improved reading comprehension. The study demonstrates how digital tools can facilitate strengthening students' decoding skills as efficiently as a traditional phonics‐based programme while students are reading text of relatively high orthographic complexity for meaning.

Objective: Many studies have demonstrated that personality traits predict academic performance for students in high school and college. Much less evidence exists on whether the relationship between personality traits and academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence, and existing studies show very mixed findings. This study tests one hypothesis—that the importance of Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness for academic performance changes fundamentally during school—against an alternative hypothesis suggesting that the changing relationships found in previous research are largely measurement artifacts.Method: We used a nationwide sample of 135,389 primary and lower secondary students from Grade 4 to Grade 8. We replicated all results in a separate sample of another 127,375 students.Results: We found that academic performance was equally strongly related to our measure of Conscientiousness at all these grade levels, and the significance of Agreeableness and Emotional Stability predominantly reflected their connections with Conscientiousness. However, age also appeared to shape the relationship between Emotional Stability and performance.Conclusion: Amidst the replication crisis in psychology these findings demonstrate a very stable and predictable relationship between personality traits and academic performance, which may have important implications for the education of children already in primary school.