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The goal of this paper is to estimate peer influence in video gaming time among adolescents. Using a nationally representative sample of the U.S. school-aged adolescents in 2009–2010, we estimate a structural model that accounts for the potential biases in the estimate of the peer effect. Our peer group is exogenously assigned and includes one year older adolescents in the same school grade as the respondent. The peer measure is based on peers’ own reports of video gaming time. We find that an additional one hour of playing video games per week by older grade-mates results in .47 hours increase in video gaming time by male responders. We do not find significant peer effect among female responders. Effective policies aimed at influencing the time that adolescents spend video gaming should take these findings into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common policy approach to reducing childhood obesity aims to shape the environment in which children spend most of their time: neighborhoods and schools. This paper uses richly detailed data on the body mass index (BMI) of all New York City public school students in grades K-8 to assess the potential for place-based approaches to reduce child obesity. We document variation in the prevalence of obesity across NYC public schools and census tracts, and then estimate the extent to which this variation can be explained by differences in individual-level predictors (such as race and household income). Both unadjusted and adjusted variability across neighborhoods and schools suggest place-based policies have the potential to meaningfully reduce child obesity, but under most realistic scenarios the improvement would be modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies with a focus on the interrelationships among health information seeking behavior (HISB), and health status or use of preventive health measures for U.S. adults both with and without a high school diploma. Key results of ordinal and binary logistic regression analyses indicated that, after controlling for demographic factors, (1) adults with a high school diploma use more text-based health information sources while adults without a high school diploma use more oral sources, (2) using the Internet as a source of health information is more strongly related to reporting excellent/very good health status than having a high school diploma, (3) those without a high school diploma who use the Internet report the largest increase in health status over any other health information source, and (4) for those with learning disability or vision problem, a high facility in reading English is an important predictor of whether the Internet is used as a health information source. The Internet appears to play a key role in both enhancing health status and enabling use of preventive measures for those with and without a high school diploma; although, individuals without a high school diploma who use the Internet for health information derive substantial benefit in health status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2001 U.S. Supreme Court Case of Falvo v. Owasso School System (Owasso Independent School District No I-011 v. Falvo) has focused national attention on the common classroom practice of peer-grading. In a unanimous decision the court reaffirmed the popular view that students grading each others' tests is valuable, saving teachers' time and augmenting student learning. Our study puts these presumed benefits to the test in 4 middle school science classrooms. We compared teacher-assigned grades to those awarded either by students to themselves or by their peers. By training students to grade with the help of a scoring rubric, a very high correlation was obtained between students and their teacher on test questions (r = 0.91 to 0.94). We found patterns of bias when students assigned grades. When grading others, students awarded lower grades to the best performing students than their teacher did. When grading themselves, lower performing students tended to inflate their own low scores. Performance on an unannounced, 2nd administration of the same test 1 week later measured the degree to which student-grading resulted in any increased understanding. Students who graded their peers' tests did not gain significantly more than a control group of students who did not correct any papers but simply took the same test again. Those students who corrected their own tests improved dramatically. Self-grading and peer-grading appear to be reasonable aids to saving teachers' time. Self-grading appears to result in increased student learning; peer-grading does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]