Does early educational tracking contribute to gender gaps in test achievement? A cross-country assessment

Theresa Lorenz () and Alyssa Schneebaum

No 309, Department of Economics Working Paper Series from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Abstract: On average, boys score higher than girls on math achievement tests and girls score higher than boys in reading. A worrying fact is that these gaps increase between primary and secondary school. This paper investigates the role of early educational tracking (sorting students into different types of secondary schools at an early age) on gender gaps in test achievement. We analyze PISA, PIRLS, and TIMSS data to study how cross-country variation in the age of first tracking affects the country-specifc widening gender gap in a difference-in-differences framework. We find strong evidence that early tracking increases gender differences in reading. Early tracking also increases the gender gap in math scores, but the results for math are sensitive to the year of the dataset analyzed and to the inclusion of particular countries in the analysis. For both subjects, every year for which the age of first tracking is postponed weakens the effect of early tracking on the gender gap in achievement.

Keywords: PISA; TIMSS; PIRLS; gender gaps; educational systems; early tracking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gen and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://epub.wu.ac.at/8031/ original version (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://epub.wu.ac.at/8031/ [308 PERMANENT REDIRECT]--> https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/8031 [302 FOUND]--> https://research.wu.ac.at/en/publications/2746850c-2876-4793-a06c-9bc66cbbb04b)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wiw:wus005:8031

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Paper Series from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WU Library ().