India shining and Bharat drowning: comparing two Indian states to the worldwide distribution in mathematics achievement

Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc ()

No 4644, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international testing agency together with statistical methods from Item Response Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states -Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution of mathematics achievement. These two states fall below 43 of the 51 countries for which data exist. The bottom 5 percent of children rank higher than the bottom 5 percent in only three countries-South Africa, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. But not all students test poorly. Inequality in the test-score distribution for both states is next only to South Africa in the worldwide ranking exercise. Consequently, and to the extent that these two states can represent India, the two statements"for every ten top performers in the United States there are four in India"and"for every ten low performers in the United States there are two hundred in India"are both consistent with the data. The combination of India's size and large variance in achievement give both the perceptions that India is shining even as Bharat, the vernacular for India, is drowning. Comparable estimates of inequalities in learning are the building blocks for substantive research on the correlates of earnings inequality in India and other low-income countries; the methods proposed here allow for independent testing exercises to build up such data by linking scores to internationally comparable tests.

Keywords: Secondary Education; Educational Sciences; Teaching and Learning; Primary Education; Tertiary Education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev and nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... ered/PDF/wps4644.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: India shining and Bharat drowning: Comparing two Indian states to the worldwide distribution in mathematics achievement (2010)
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:wbk:wbrwps:4644

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().