In countries with a school-entry cutoff date, individuals born right after the cutoff are almost 1 year older than individuals in the same school cohort born right before that date. Abundant research has documented that, as a result of that extra year of maturation and skill accumulation, older students in a cohort outperform their younger peers.…

This study aims to investigate which factors are associated with Turkey's 15-year-olds' scoring above the OECD average (493) on the PISA'09 reading assessment. Collected from a total of 4,996 15-year-old students from Turkey, data were analyzed by logistic regression analysis in order to model the data of students who were split into two: (1)…

The Reconstructed Cohort Method is often used to examine the status of national education. However, this method does not account for individual details and we know little about the status of school enrolments by tracking individual students from entrance until dropout or graduation. This study employs the True Cohort Method to analyse data for…

Forty years ago, 96% of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade or above. As of 2005, the figure was just 84%. The school attendance rate of six-year-olds has not decreased; rather, they are increasingly likely to be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first grade. This paper documents this historical shift. We show that only about a…