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Title: Ordinal Estimation of Income-Achievement Gaps and Adult Outcome Inequality
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Nielsen, Eric R. |
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Ordinal Estimation of Income-Achievement Gaps and Adult Outcome Inequality Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The University of Chicago, 2014 Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97 Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): Academic Development; Achievement; Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Income; Income Level; Test Scores/Test theory/IRT Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper discusses various methods for assessing group differences in academic achievement using only the ordinal content of achievement test scores. Researchers and policymakers frequently use test-score data to draw conclusions about achievement differences between various populations. Such investigations almost always use methods that rely on the cardinal comparability of (standardized) achievement test scores. This paper shows that relying on cardinal methods can lead to conclusions about changes in inequality that are not supported by the ordinal information contained in test scores. Applied to the NLSY79 and NLSY97 surveys, commonly-employed, cardinal methods suggest that the gap in academic achievement between adolescents from high-income and low-income households did not change. In contrast, ordinal methods indicate that this gap narrowed substantially between these two cohorts. The relative improvement in reading achievement is driven both by an adverse shift in the distribution of scores among high-income students and an improvement in the distribution of scores among low-income students. Therefore, any weighting scheme that places more value on higher test scores must conclude that the reading gap between high and low-income students narrowed over time. The situation for math achievement is more complex. Nevertheless, low-income students in the middle deciles of the low-income math achievement distribution unambiguously gained relative to their high-income counterparts. These findings appear to contradict much of the literature on recent trends in parental spending on children by income class. |
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Bibliography Citation
Nielsen, Eric R. Ordinal Estimation of Income-Achievement Gaps and Adult Outcome Inequality. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The University of Chicago, 2014. |