| Frank Adamson
Stanford University
Achieving educational equity: Comparing achievement scores, opportunities to learn, and teacher preparation among different socio-economic groups in TIMSS and PISA
Policymakers in the United States and internationally consistently espouse the goal of educational equity. One key to realizing educational equity is addressing the systematic relationship of student achievement to student socio-economic statues (SES) and country level inequalities in social class (Rothstein, 2004). Few studies have explored these systematic relationships in connection to educational resources that states provide to students of different SES background (Berne and Stiefel, 1984). This study examines the chain of influence between student and country economic characteristics, provision of educational resources, and student achievement for countries participating in TIMSS and PISA.
In Part I the relationship of macroeconomic indicators for all participating countries is examined using three dependent variables: student math achievement, teacher preparation, and opportunities to learn. Two independent economic variables are used: Gross National Income per capita (GNI), and the Gini coefficient (income inequality). Student data are grouped into SES quintiles which interact with GNI and the Gini coefficient. In Part II, the author estimates within-country production functions for twelve countries in both PISA and TIMSS, with test scores as outcomes and vectors of school capacity, classroom resources, and student characteristics as inputs. Finally, countries are grouped by low and high GNI and low, middle, and high Gini and compared to inputs for different SES groups in these economically different groups of countries.
The study does not purport to estimate causal relationships, but rather offers a correlative analysis of relationships between school resources provided to different SES groups and student achievement, across economically different countries. An additional study outcome is the comparison of TIMSS and PISA. The IEA (TIMSS) claims to measure curricular delivery of a particular county, while the OECD (PISA) professes to measure the readiness of 15-year-olds for labor force participation. Theoretically, these two projects have different meanings for the nation-state. If the findings from this study are similar across both tests, then we can infer that once reliable tests are developed to measure student learning, the focus on independent variables may be more important for educational policy than for the tests themselves.
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