Research

Peer Ability and Dynamics of Classrooms

Classrooms are social environments where peer interactions shape how students learn and develop. This study examines how peer ability shapes the foundational cognitive skills that facilitate learning and the social dynamics that evolve alongside them. I show that as early as first grade, exposure to higher-ability classmates raises both fluid intelligence and cognitive empathy, skills that are essential for learning and social understanding. These gains are not uniform: students who enter school with stronger initial ability benefit more from their high-ability peers. This divergence emerges alongside shifts in how students form friendships, as peer ability shapes classroom networks asymmetrically. High-ability students tend to become more homophilic in their friendships as peer ability increases, whereas low-ability students form ties that are less concentrated within their ability group. These findings highlight that peer ability effects extend beyond test scores to foundational cognitive skills, and that the structure of students’ social networks plays a pivotal role in how classroom composition matters for learning.

From Teacher Cognition to Student Reasoning: Development of Higher-Order Thinking in the Classroom with Sule Alan

We investigate the impact of teachers’ intelligence on the development of children’s cognitive abilities. Our setting leverages the random assignment of first-grade students to teachers, who tend to remain their primary instructors across subjects for four years. We measure a wide range of outcomes: core cognitive functions (attention, working memory), foundational skills (numeracy, verbal ability), higher-order reasoning (abstract reasoning, analogical reasoning, analytical categorization, critical thinking), and socio-cognitive skills (cognitive empathy, norm-based reasoning). We find that teachers with high fluid intelligence substantially enhance children’s higher-order reasoning and socio-cognitive skills, alongside improvements in core cognition and literacy. We examine several potential mechanisms related to teaching style, beliefs, and attitudes. Beyond these, one striking channel emerges: teachers with higher intelligence foster denser and more cohesive classroom friendship networks, which in turn support peer-to-peer learning without reinforcing ability-based segregation. These findings demonstrate that teacher intelligence shapes the development of higher-order reasoning and socio-cognitive capacities, which are central to the formation of human and social capital.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Peer Relationships: Insights from Classroom Social Networks with Betul Turkum Draft
R&R at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

In the spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, governments implemented drastic containment measures, including widespread school closures that deprived millions of children of their primary social environment—the classroom. To understand how the pandemic affected classroom peer relationships, we leverage social network data from 3rd and 4th-grade students in Turkish primary schools, comparing pre-pandemic and pandemic cohorts across three relationship types: friendship, academic support, and emotional support. We document opposing changes across network types: friendship isolation increased by 22%, while academic support nominations rose by 20%. These improvements in academic support were driven entirely by native students; refugee students faced deterioration in both friendship and academic support networks. Our findings show that large-scale disruptions can reshape peer relationships in complex ways, underscoring the vital role of the classroom in building social capital.