Equality of educational opportunity employing PISA data: taking both achievement and access into account

Márcia de Carvalho (), Luis Gamboa and Fábio Waltenberg ()

No 10239, Documentos de Trabajo from Universidad del Rosario

Abstract: Abstract: While PISA datasets have been used for measuring inequality of educational opportunity they have important limitations: (i) samples only cover a relatively limited fraction of developing countries´ cohorts of 15-year-olds, and (ii) such fractions are not uniform across countries and waves. This casts doubts on the reliability of such measures when used for international and intertemporal comparisons: a milder calculated inequality of opportunity in a given country at a given moment might simply be the artifact of a more restricted and homogeneous sample. Previous attempts of addressing this problem have focused on explicitly reconstructing full samples. Here an alternative path is followed, relying on bidimensional indices, in which equality of opportunity in achievement is the first dimension and equality of opportunity for access to the exam is the second one. We compute the two dimensions and aggregate them using alternative techniques. Employing PISA 2006/2009 data for six Latin-American countries we observe rank reversals when comparing results based upon our indices and those based upon conventional indices of equality of opportunity for achievement. We then generalize our approach allowing for more dimensions and parameterizing the dimensions´ weights.Resumen: La medición de la desigualdad de oportunidades con las bases de PISA implican varias limitaciones: (i) la muestra sólo representa una fracción limitada de las cohortes de jóvenes de 15 anos en los países en desarrollo y (ii) estas fracciones no son uniformes entre países ni entre periodos. Lo anterior genera dudas sobe la confiabilidad de estas mediciones cuando se usan para comparaciones internacionales: mayor equidad puede ser resultado de una muestra más restringida y más homogénea. A diferencia de enfoques previos basados en reconstrucción de las muestras, el enfoque del documento consiste en proveer un índice bidimensional que incluye logro y acceso como dimensiones del índice. Se utilizan varios métodos de agregación y se observan cambios considerables en los rankings de (in) equidad de oportunidades cuando solo se observa el logro y cuando se observan ambas dimensiones en las pruebas de PISA 2006/2009. Finalmente se propone una generalización del enfoque permitiendo otras dimensiones adicionales y otros pesos utilizados en la agregación

Keywords: equality of opportunity; measurement of inequality of opportunity; multidimensional measures; PISA test scores; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25
Date: 2012-11-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lam
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Equality of Educational Ppportunity Employing PISA Data: Taking both Achievement and Access into Account (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000092:010239

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