English Proficiency and Test Scores of Immigrant Children in the US

Ainoa Aparicio

No 10848, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Immigrant children in the US tend to perform worse in reading, mathematics, and science compared to native children. This paper explores how much of such differences in achievement can be accounted for by a lack of English proficiency. To identify the causal effect of English proficiency on cognitive test scores, I use the fact that language proficiency is closely linked to age at arrival, and that migrant children arrive at different ages from different countries of origin. In particular, I instrument English proficiency by comparing children from English-speaking countries to children from non-English-speaking countries who migrated to the US at different ages. Using data from the New Immigrant Survey, I find that speaking English very badly or badly can explain 27–33% of the achievement gap between native and immigrant children in standardized language-related tests. However, I find no significant language effects for applied maths problems or calculations.

Keywords: English-speaking countries; standardized tests; English proficiency; immigrant children; age at arrival (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J13 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published - published as 'English Proficiency and Mathematics Test Scores of Immigrant Children in the US' in: Economics of Education Review, 2018, 64, 102-113

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp10848.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: English Proficiency and Test Scores of Immigrant Children in the US (2017)
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:iza:izadps:dp10848

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().