School attendance and student achievement: Evidence from rural Honduras

Increasing school participation and academic achievements in crucial in combating poverty and raising income in developing countries. In this article we examined two interrelated problems, low school attendance and low academic achievement, in the context of rural Honduras. We specified and estimated a model of school attendance that depended on the costs as well as on the expected achievement gains associated with school attendance. This approach also allowed us to examine the determinants to educational achievement. The structural school attendance model supported the hypothesis that expected achievement gains influence the demand for primary schooling. The strongest factor associated with academic achievement was teacher quality, which, in this study, measured the use of an active and participative cooperative-learning pedagogy. Increasing school attendance in order to reduce repetition and drop-out rates is a challenge in developing countries, especially in rural areas. The results of this article demonstrate that increasing the expected achievement gains from schooling through appropriate investments in school quality is a potential channel through which this objective might be fulfilled. Although the rural nature of the sample limits a generalization, the results clearly displayed the direct and indirect effects of investing in school quality.