Connection,connectivity and choice: Learning during COVID-19 restrictions across mainstream schools and Flexible Learning Programmes in Australia

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated school closures may have constrained educational participation particularly for students in disadvantaged circumstances. We explore how 30 disadvantaged students in secondary school (14 mainstream/16 Flexible Learning Programme) from Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania experienced home learning during the first wave of COVID-19, teasing out nuances across two educational models. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with these students, our analysis revealed three interconnected themes inflecting their learning: connection, connectivity and choice. Connection captures the desire for belonging and practices that facilitated meeting this desire during system-wide disruptions to school routines and face-to-face learning. Connectivity captures the impact of digitally facilitated learning at home on students' ability to engage with curriculum content and with their learning community. Choice captures the availability of viable options to overcome barriers students encountered in their learning and possibilities to flexibly accommodate student preferences and learning needs. Students from Flexible Learning Programmes appeared generally better supported to exercise agency within the scope of their lived experience of home-based learning. Findings indicate a need for strengthening student-centred policy and practices aimed at leveraging the affordances of information technology, balancing self-directed and structured learning and providing holistic support to enable meaningful student choice.     

How Important is Selection? Experimental VS. Non‐Experimental Measures of the Income Gains from Migration

How much do migrants stand to gain in income from moving across borders? Answering this question is complicated by non‐random selection of migrants from the general population, which makes it hard to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non‐migrants. New Zealand allows a quota of Tongans to immigrate each year with a random ballot used to choose among the excess number of applicants. A unique survey conducted by the authors allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration to be obtained by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate, but whose names were not drawn in the ballot, after allowing for the effect of non‐compliance among some of those whose names were drawn. We also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the ballot. Comparing this non‐applicant group to the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non‐experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration. We find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills. As a result, non‐experimental methods other than instrumental variables are found to overstate the gains from migration by 20–82%, with difference‐in‐differences and bias‐adjusted matching estimators performing best among the alternatives to instrumental variables. (JEL: J61, F22, C21)