- 著者
- 樊 怡舟 中尾 走 西谷 元 村澤 昌崇
- 出版者
- 日本行動計量学会
- 雑誌
- 行動計量学 (ISSN:03855481)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.48, no.2, pp.69-77, 2021 (Released:2022-04-27)
- 参考文献数
- 11
In the research area of evaluating the effectiveness of study abroad programs, adopting counterfactual frameworks such as DID, PSM or IV has been considered a valid analytical approach. Previous findings drawn based on these conventional frameworks suggest that even short-term study abroad programs have a significant effect on the improvement of TOEIC scores. However, these studies are often designed to estimate the effects with students’ prior TOEIC scores, and only controlling departmental or school affiliations, while confounding factors, particularly students’ competency such as learning attitudes as well as learning motivations, remain uncontrolled. This study attempts to extract students’ competency from high-dimensional data with a large volume of missing values in student’s test score sheets, using the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) method. Injecting the extracted competency in the subsequent regression analysis en ables us to accurately estimate the causality between the study abroad experience and the observed outcomes. Our analysis result reveals that, unlike findings from earlier studies, once students’ competency is properly controlled, the estimated effect of the study abroad programs becomes negligible with no significance. Therefore, the finding suggests that the causal effect claimed by the previous studies might be due to a bias engendered by students’ self-selection. The result also indicates that datasets readily accessible at any university, such as student test score sheets, could effectively be used for project evaluations within an institution, notably because the confounding factors are properly controlled as suggested by the current study.
本研究は,因果推論の勃興を契機とし,社会科学の半ば慣習的な統計分析が再考を迫られると認識した.そこで,従来は因果分析とされたが,厳密には因果推論ではない分析を仮に“説明”とし,その再定義,モデル評価,係数の解釈に関する新たな理論を構築する.この取組について、社会科学の方法論について深遠な議論を展開している専門家、心理学、経済学、統計科学、データサイエンスを代表する専門家と共同し議論を深めていく。併せて、新たな実験的調査を実施し、得られた情報に関して、新たな"解釈"の可能性を検討する。