Search Results
Title: The Production of Cognitive Achievement in Children: Home, School and Racial Test Score Gaps
Resulting in 1 citation.
| 1. |
Todd, Petra E. Wolpin, Kenneth I. |
|
The Production of Cognitive Achievement in Children: Home, School and Racial Test Score Gaps Presented: Buffalo, NY, Human Capital Conference, 2006. Also: http://athena.sas.upenn.edu/~petra/papers/revpaper.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); Hispanics; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Maternal Employment; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Racial Differences; School Characteristics/Rating/Safety; Teachers/Faculty Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper studies the determinants of children's scores on tests of cognitive achievement in math and reading. Using rich longitudinal data on test scores, home environments, and schools, we implement alternative specifications for the cognitive achievement production function that allow achievement to depend on the entire history of lagged home and school inputs as well as on parents' ability and unobserved endowments. The empirical results show that both contemporaneous and lagged inputs matter in the production of current achievement and the importance of allowing for unobserved endowment effects. We use cross-validation methods to select among competing specifications and find support for a variant of a value-added model of the production function augmented to include information on lagged inputs. Using this specification, we study the sources of test score gaps between black, white and Hispanic children. The estimated model captures key patterns in the data, such as the widening of minority-white test score gaps with age and differences in the gap pattern between Hispanics and blacks. We find that differences in mother's ability (as measured by AFQT) accounts for about half of the test score gap. However, home inputs also account for a significant proportion. Equalizing home inputs at the average levels of white children would close the black-white and the Hispanic-white test score gaps in math and reading by about 10-20%. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Columbia University and at the Institute for Research on Poverty conference in Madison, WI. An earlier version was presented at seminars at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Harris School of Public Policy (Chicago), UCLA, UCSD, Columbia University, University of Toulouse, University of Bergen, and a conference at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. |
|
|
Bibliography Citation
Todd, Petra E. and Kenneth I. Wolpin. "The Production of Cognitive Achievement in Children: Home, School and Racial Test Score Gaps." Presented: Buffalo, NY, Human Capital Conference, 2006. |