Noncognitive Skills and the Black-White Test Score Gap

• In Event: Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Examining Racial/Ethnic and Socioeconomic Inequality

Abstract

We still do not understand how much of the black-white achievement gap can be attributed to black-white gaps in noncognitive skills. In this paper, I use Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort data with fixed effects models and lagged dependent variable models to estimate the effect of noncognitive skills on the achievement gap. Then, I use a Oaxaca Decomposition to estimate the proportion of the black-white achievement gap accounted for by noncognitive skills in kindergarten, first, third, and fifth grades. My estimates, which are conservative, suggest that black-white gaps in noncognitive skills account for up to 12% of the black-white test score gap and up to 27% of the racial divide in teacher ratings of academic skills in early grades.

Author

• Jill Bowdon, University of Pennsylvania