Research

Work in Progress

Peer Ability and Dynamics of Classrooms

Abstract

Classrooms are social environments where peer interactions shape how students learn and develop. Leveraging the random assignment of first-grade students to teachers in Turkish public schools and longitudinal data following students through four years of primary school, I examine how peer ability shapes foundational cognitive and socio-cognitive skills and the social relationships that develop alongside them. A one standard deviation increase in assigned peer ability raises fluid intelligence by 0.03 SD and cognitive empathy by 0.06 SD on average, alongside gains of 0.09 SD in numeracy and 0.11 SD in literacy. The effects on numeracy and literacy increasingly favor students who enter school with higher initial ability. These differences in learning emerge alongside an evolution in classroom social relationships. Higher peer ability strengthens within-group friendship among high-ability students while encouraging low-ability students to form relatively more ties with high-ability classmates. This cross-ability response is strongest early in primary school and weakens over time. A complementary analysis shows that low-ability students’ nominations toward high-ability classmates become relatively less likely to be reciprocated as students progress through primary school. These findings show that peer ability affects foundational skills as well as academic achievement, while classroom social relationships evolve substantially alongside these effects.

From Teacher Intelligence to Student Reasoning: Development of Cognitive and Higher-Order Thinking Skills in the Classroom with Sule Alan

Abstract

We study how teacher ability, measured by fluid intelligence, shapes student learning and the development of higher-order thinking skills. Exploiting the random assignment of first-grade students to teachers in Turkish public schools, we follow approximately 10,000 children over four years of primary school. Our findings identify teacher cognitive ability as an important determinant of both academic learning and the development of higher-order thinking skills. A one standard deviation increase in teacher fluid intelligence raises foundational literacy and numeracy by 0.047 and higher-order thinking skills by 0.034 standard deviations on average. These include abstract, analogical, categorical, and critical reasoning, skills that are rarely directly taught in the classroom. Evidence on mechanisms points to the classroom peer environment as one underexplored channel: more able teachers generate stronger peer effects and foster classroom environments that facilitate learning among students.

Publications

COVID-19 and Peer Relationships: Insights from Classroom Social Networks with Betul Turkum Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 248 (August 2026), 107661.

Abstract

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 classroom peer relationships differed between the pre-pandemic and pandemic cohorts, 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.