ANET Lab Seminar Series
Tamás Keller (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies): Randomized field experiments in the sociology of education

Abstract | In my talk, I provide an overview of field experiments that I conduct in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. My talk aims to promote an open and transparent research culture based on pre-registered research designs and transparent research documentations to antedate the highest experimental research quality standards. My approach is to break the fundamental theory-driven problems of educational sociology into smaller, policy-relevant, more manageable questions. I scrutinize the impact of light-touch, scalable, easy-to-implement, and low-cost interventions. My examples include the effects of deskmates on students’ various outcomes in primary education, the impact of encouragement in tertiary education, and the role of self-concept in deceptive behavior.

Bio | Tamás Keller is an empirical sociologist specialized in the sociology of education using quantitative methods. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Corvinus University of Budapest. He spent his post-doctoral years at the Department of Public Economics at the Free University of Berlin, and at Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). His current research advances the understanding of educational inequalities by focusing on contextual drivers, including social background and peer effects. He leads and coordinates large-scale field experiments that explore the causal mechanisms that contribute to educational inequality.