Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
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Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
#2>For a sense of scale, Mathematica Policy Research’s best evidence on the effectiveness of the highly touted KIPP charter school network finds that after three years at KIPP there is significant improvement on three out of four test metrics — up 0.25 standard deviations on one English test, 0.22 standard deviations on another, and 0.28 standard deviations on one of two math tests.
I wasn't sure what .22 std deviations meant, so I looked stuff up a bit. For a normal distribution, going from the average to 1 standard deviation above is going from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile. Going up .22 standard deviations from the average is going from the 50th percentile to about the 55th percentile.
Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
#3Also, turns out preventing kids from getting sick improves educational outcomes.
Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
#4[dead]
Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
#5Personal anecdote getting an airthings that reminds me to open the window (along with a pushover api setup) has probably been the biggest productivity improvement in 10 years.
Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
#6Someone writes whether the data actually shows what it purports to show: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/01/09/filters-be...
> The whole thing is driven by one data point and a linear trend which makes no theoretical sense in the context of the paper (from the abstract: “Air testing conducted inside schools during the leak (but before air filters were installed) showed no presence of natural gas pollutants, implying that the effectiveness of air filters came from removing common air pollutants”) but does serve to create a background trend to allow a big discontinuity with some statistical significance.
I’m reminded of the walkback of scientific studies showing massive benefits from giving kids in third world countries deworming medications: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/23/research-glo....
My beef with Matt Y.’s worldview of “scientifically driven public policy” is that the costs and benefits of public policy interventions are so devilishly difficult to study that you can’t meaningfully use them on realistic time scales to drive policy. This is an exceedingly simple hypothesis—filtering air improves test scores—that can easily be tested while controlling for confounding factors. But even then it’s hard!
Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
#7Does anyone have any details on what kind of filter this was? I bought a relatively high-MERV filter for my home, but I’m wondering what I should actually be trying to filter out.
Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
#8Also, turns out preventing kids from getting sick improves educational outcomes.
My dad made a similar observation, assuming the children were young. However, upon reviewing the article, I noticed it doesn’t explicitly mention the grade level. Considering younger children have weaker immune systems, this could potentially lead to fewer missed classes and improved grades. Personally, my first grader misses out on a considerable number of classes.
However, if these results were observed in grades 3 or higher, it could suggest a more substantial phenomenon. I randomly picked the third grade, but perhaps there’s a specific age after which the medical community considers a child’s immunity to be significantly enhanced.
Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
#9I'm all for installing air filters in classrooms for a number of reasons, but I also think the extreme results from this study aren't going to hold up to further research.
From the paper:
> To do so, I leverage a unique setting arising from the largest gas leak in United States history, whereby the offending gas company installed air filters in every classroom, office and common area for all schools within five miles of the leak (but not beyond). This variation allows me to compare student achievement in schools receiving air filters relative to those that did not using a spatial regression discontinuity design.
In other words, the paper looked at test scores at different schools in different areas on different years and assumed that the only change was the air filters. Anyone who has worked with school kids knows that the variations between classes from year to year can be extreme, as can differences produced by different teachers or even school policies.
Again, I think air filtration is great indoors, but expecting test scores to improve dramatically like this is not realistic. This feels like another extremely exaggerated health claim, like past claims made about fish oil supplements. Fish oil was briefly thought to have extreme positive health benefits from a number of very small studies like this, but as sample sizes became larger and studies became higher quality, most of the beneficial effects disappeared.
Re: Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits (2020)
#10I'm all for installing air filters in classrooms for a number of reasons, but I also think the extreme results from this study aren't going to hold up to further research. From the paper: > To do so, I leverage a unique setting arising from the largest gas leak in United States history, whereby the offending gas company installed air filters in every classroom, office and common area for all schools within five miles…
If anything, schools able to implement air filtration and fresh air exchanges systems are likely those flush with cash and supportive parents.