Wouldn’t this actually be evidence against school doing something? I.e. we have discovered that relative age is more important than years of education?
Within this sample, years of education would be mostly fixed. Those with more/fewer would run into selection effects (e.g. getting held back a grade gets more years schooling, but presumably lower odds of getting into Oxford).
Suppose we were doing chemistry instead of schooling (so that I didn’t already know the answer).
I have two beakers, one labeled 6.01 and one labeled 6.99 and I then pour 12 units of “school” into each beaker. Afterwards I discover that the beaker labeled 6.99 has produced 2x as much “oxford” as the beaker labeled 6.01. The conclusion I would come to would not be that “school” is pretty good at producing “oxford”.
Even more fun, I challenge you to predict the amount of “oxford” produced by adding 12 units of “home school” instead of “school”.
It’ not about relative age (either as in age of one person divided by age of another or one age substracted from another), it’s about their month of birth. So it’s evidence for relevance of amount of received sunshine during pregnancy, relevance of age of being admitted in school and relevance of astrology.
Since it seems to somewhat align with different kinds of education starting in different times of year, my personal bet is on schools, though I wouldn’t completely discount differences of pregnancies in different times of the year (sorry, astrology, but I need a lot more evidence to seriously consider you).
Did they compare regions with different cut-off dates? For example, in NY it’s in December, and in MA it’s in September. Actually looks like it’s 12⁄1 in NYC and 12⁄31 on Long Island, too. Those would help distinguish age vs sunlight or other seasonal effects on development.
I think “applying for Oxford” is doing more work in that sentence then you give it credit for—it isn’t a random sample, it’s already skewed to only include those 17 year olds for whom the relative age effect wasn’t enough to stop them from performing well in school. One of my freshman year roommates at Harvard, and probably the smartest of us all academically, was 16, having skipped grades—obviously these people exist, and obviously people like parents, teachers, and guidance counselers are already steering students towards applying to schools that match their ability levels at the start of senior year of high school.
The comparison I care about (and that age cohort studies are trying to approximate) for this question is how much more those 17 year olds would have learned, over the course of all their years of schooling, if they’d been a little older at the very beginning. To look at that, I’d want to see, for example, whether the proportion of students applying to Oxford, or becoming valedictorian of their high school class, are more likely to be older or younger.
Wouldn’t this actually be evidence against school doing something? I.e. we have discovered that relative age is more important than years of education?
Within this sample, years of education would be mostly fixed. Those with more/fewer would run into selection effects (e.g. getting held back a grade gets more years schooling, but presumably lower odds of getting into Oxford).
That’s exactly my point.
Suppose we were doing chemistry instead of schooling (so that I didn’t already know the answer).
I have two beakers, one labeled 6.01 and one labeled 6.99 and I then pour 12 units of “school” into each beaker. Afterwards I discover that the beaker labeled 6.99 has produced 2x as much “oxford” as the beaker labeled 6.01. The conclusion I would come to would not be that “school” is pretty good at producing “oxford”.
Even more fun, I challenge you to predict the amount of “oxford” produced by adding 12 units of “home school” instead of “school”.
It’ not about relative age (either as in age of one person divided by age of another or one age substracted from another), it’s about their month of birth. So it’s evidence for relevance of amount of received sunshine during pregnancy, relevance of age of being admitted in school and relevance of astrology.
Since it seems to somewhat align with different kinds of education starting in different times of year, my personal bet is on schools, though I wouldn’t completely discount differences of pregnancies in different times of the year (sorry, astrology, but I need a lot more evidence to seriously consider you).
Did they compare regions with different cut-off dates? For example, in NY it’s in December, and in MA it’s in September. Actually looks like it’s 12⁄1 in NYC and 12⁄31 on Long Island, too. Those would help distinguish age vs sunlight or other seasonal effects on development.
Yes this effect is consistent across different countries with different cut off dates.
That would imply there’s a huge difference in abilities between 17 vs 18 year olds applying for Oxford, which sounds too extreme.
I think “applying for Oxford” is doing more work in that sentence then you give it credit for—it isn’t a random sample, it’s already skewed to only include those 17 year olds for whom the relative age effect wasn’t enough to stop them from performing well in school. One of my freshman year roommates at Harvard, and probably the smartest of us all academically, was 16, having skipped grades—obviously these people exist, and obviously people like parents, teachers, and guidance counselers are already steering students towards applying to schools that match their ability levels at the start of senior year of high school.
The comparison I care about (and that age cohort studies are trying to approximate) for this question is how much more those 17 year olds would have learned, over the course of all their years of schooling, if they’d been a little older at the very beginning. To look at that, I’d want to see, for example, whether the proportion of students applying to Oxford, or becoming valedictorian of their high school class, are more likely to be older or younger.