Assessing policies for schools with low socioeconomic opportunities: insights from invalsi tests

This study analyzes the results of Italian students in the INVALSI Mathematics tests, with a particular focus on the students’ socioeconomic and cultural background and how this influences test outcomes. More specifically, the study aims to analyze whether the ministry’s intervention of suggesting smaller class sizes for schools attended by students with more disadvantaged socioeconomic and cultural conditions helps to reduce the performance gap among students. To do this, we use the Regression Discontinuity (RD) design, which has recently emerged as one of the most credible non-experimental strategies for the analysis of the causal effects.