Country-Level Heterogeneity in School-Level Contextual Effect of Socioeconomic Status: International Comparison Using Multilevel Modeling

• In Event: 54.081 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: 54.081-8 - Applying Multilevel Modeling in Substantive Research

Abstract

One vexing failure to achieve educational equity is the tendency for students of lower socioeconomic status (SES) to have lower educational achievement. In addition, there is a contextual effect: students with similar SES tend to have lower achievement when attending schools of lower mean SES. Using data from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), I investigated country-level heterogeneity in the contextual effect of SES on mathematics scores. Using multilevel modeling, I found a large variation in contextual effect among the 64 countries in PISA. The SD of country-level variability was about 57 score points: over half of the standard deviation of the test. Interestingly, the United States did better than the PISA-wide average in this regard.

Author

• James M Mason, University of California - Berkeley