Related papers: Sequential Choices, Option Values, and the Returns…
Value-added models have been widely used to assess the contributions of individual teachers and schools to students' academic growth based on longitudinal student achievement outcomes. There is concern, however, that ignoring the presence…
Building interpretable parameterizations of real-world decision-making on the basis of demonstrated behavior -- i.e. trajectories of observations and actions made by an expert maximizing some unknown reward function -- is essential for…
Pursuing educational qualifications later in life is an increasingly common phenomenon within OECD countries since technological change and automation continues to drive the evolution of skills needed in many professions. We focus on the…
Course selection is a crucial activity for students as it directly impacts their workload and performance. It is also time-consuming, prone to subjectivity, and often carried out based on incomplete information. This task can, nevertheless,…
A growing number of universities worldwide use various forms of online and blended learning as part of their academic curricula. Furthermore, the recent changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a drastic increase in importance…
Providing users with alternatives to choose from is an essential component in many online platforms, making the accurate prediction of choice vital to their success. A renewed interest in learning choice models has led to significant…
Educational systems have traditionally been evaluated using cross-sectional studies, namely, examining a pretest, posttest, and single intervention. Although this is a popular approach, it does not model valuable information such as…
This Work in Progress Research paper departs from the recent, turbulent changes in global societies, forcing many citizens to re-skill themselves to (re)gain employment. Learners therefore need to be equipped with skills to be autonomous…
Statistical mechanics determines the abundance of different arrangements of matter depending on cost-benefit balances. Its formalism and phenomenology percolate throughout biological processes and set limits to effective computation. Under…
Lacking lifetime income data, most intergenerational mobility estimates are subject to lifecycle bias. Using long income series from Sweden and the US, we illustrate that standard correction methods struggle to account for one important…
This paper investigates the dynamic complementarity between school health and education reforms implemented in Denmark between 1940 and 1965: the introduction of school doctors and the expansion of secondary education. Using a staggered…
As AI agents generate increasingly sophisticated behaviors, manually encoding human preferences to guide these agents becomes more challenging. To address this, it has been suggested that agents instead learn preferences from human choice…
System dynamics is a methodology that is widely used in many academic fields. It explains the behavior of social and economic systems with models that capture complex causality and feedback effects. This 'practice paper' discusses the…
Dropout in higher education is commonly analysed through observable academic events such as course failure or repetition. However, these event-based perspectives may obscure the underlying structural dynamics that shape student…
A simple estimate in terms of currency units shows that a meaningful educational reform process can be launched and sustained over many generations of teachers with support of parents of students. In the estimate, the steady inflow of…
We study optimal scheduling in multi-class queueing systems with reentrance, where jobs may return for additional service after completion. Such reentrance creates feedback loops that fundamentally alter congestion dynamics and challenge…
We introduce and discuss a system of one-dimensional kinetic equations describing the influence of higher education in the social stratification of a multi-agent society. The system is obtained by coupling a model for knowledge formation…
This paper analyzes a steady state matching model interrelating the education and labor sectors. In this model, a heterogeneous population of students match with teachers to enhance their cognitive skills. As adults, they then choose to…
Building systems that autonomously create temporal abstractions from data is a key challenge in scaling learning and planning in reinforcement learning. One popular approach for addressing this challenge is the options framework (Sutton et…
The options framework in reinforcement learning models the notion of a skill or a temporally extended sequence of actions. The discovery of a reusable set of skills has typically entailed building options, that navigate to bottleneck…