Overview on the NAEP Student Socioeconomic Status Module

• In Event: 41.066 - The Development and Applications of Alternative Student Socioeconomic Status Measures

Abstract

Socioeconomic status (SES) is a legislatively mandated reporting category in NAEP and questions related to SES have been included in all past NAEP survey questionnaires. The current NAEP practice is to measure SES through a set of proxy variables which only partly capture the “Big Three” components. Out of the three main components of SES (i.e. parental education, parental occupation, and family income), NAEP currently collects parental education based on student reported data and household income information via several proxy questionnaire items including student-reported number of books at home, student-reported household possessions, and school-reported student eligibility for the NSLP and Title 1 status. For reporting purposes, NAEP treats all of the items as individual variables, rather than as a composite index similar to the index of economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS) that is reported by OECD based on PISA (OECD, 2013).
NSLP eligibility, as the most prominent NAEP measure of student SES, has become less valid over time. Consequently, at the request of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB, 2003), the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES) created an Expert Panel in 2012 that completed a white paper entitled, Improving the Measurement of Socioeconomic Status for the National Assessment of Educational Progress: A Theoretical Foundation.
After reviewing the current SES indicators used in NAEP, the NAEP SES Expert Panel (2012) concluded with four key recommendations for future SES developments in NAEP: 1) develop a core SES measure based on the “Big 3” indicators (family income, parental educational attainment, and parental occupational status); 2) consider the development of an expanded SES measure that could include neighborhood and school SES variables; 3) focus on SES composite measures rather than relying on a single proxy measure; and 4) explore possibilities of using data from the U.S. Census Bureau to link to NAEP.
Similar suggestions had been made previously, particularly to create a composite measure rather than relying on single proxy measures (Barton, 2003), and to use data linked from other sources to provide more accurate data on income, parental educational attainment, and parental occupation (Hauser & Andrew, 2007).
The availability of SES as a contextual variable enables researchers and policy makers to study educational equity and fairness issues, making the existence of a reliable and valid SES measure an important indicator that can help monitoring achievement gaps. Results from PISA 2009 indicated that students who are from socioeconomically advantaged background tend to outscore their peers from disadvantaged background by larger margins than between any other two groups of students (OECD, 2010). At the same time, the socioeconomic gradient (defined as the relationship between SES and performance, OECD, 2013) can be altered by policies targeted at increasing educational equity. PISA results show, for instance, that increasing educational equity goes along with increased achievement overall in a majority of countries (OECD, 2013). In addition, SES as a construct can be an important covariate with achievement to examine the effects of other variables, and as a matching variable in educational intervention studies.

Author

• Jonas Bertling, Educational Testing Service