Educational policies and the gender gap in test scores: a cross-country analysis

ABSTRACT

Girls tend to outperform boys in reading tests, while they usually lag behind boys in mathematics. However, the size of the gender gap varies to a great extent between countries. While the existing figliterature explains these differences as being mainly due to cultural factors, this paper explores whether this cross-country variation is related to educational policies like tracking, grade retention, and individualised teaching practices. The gender test score gap is analysed in mathematics, reading and science using the PISA 2012 dataset. Multilevel models are used in the estimation. The results suggest that the extent of the gender gap is indeed associated with certain characteristics of the various education systems. First, applying a difference-in-differences estimation method, it was found that early tracking has a direct effect on the gender gap in test scores, in favour of girls. Second, suggestive evidence shows that more student-oriented teaching practices also benefit girls relative to boys, both between and within countries, and within schools. Finally, grade retention is correlated with the gender gap, though there is further evidence suggesting that this correlation is very unlikely to represent a causal effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender gap
• tracking
• grade retention
• teaching practice
• PISA
• multilevel model

Acknowledgments

We thank Hedvig Horváth, Dániel Horn, Péter Róbert and Júlia Varga for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper. Also, we are grateful for the constructive suggestions of the anonymous reviewer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Here tracking refers to streaming students into different schools with either academic or vocational focus.

2. Using unstandardised test scores to calculate the gender gap leads to similar estimation results (results available upon request).

3. These results seem to contradict the findings of Van Hek, Buchmann, and Kraaykamp (2019)), who reports a positive effect of the tracking age on the gender slope in reading. However, she estimated this positive effect in a three-level model including schools as a separate level and, thus, controlling for sorting across schools. In that setting, the positive effect is conditional on sorting. In contrast, the two-level model here represents the unconditional association. It is to be noted that schools play an important mediating role, as sorting is part of the mechanism behind the tracking effect (Skopek and Dronkers 2015). Hence, in order to estimate the total effect, sorting across schools should not be controlled for.

4. An indicator for non-tracking is used instead of early tracking to have a coefficient with similar sign to tracking age.

5. In the 2012 PISA sample of early tracking countries the average share of girls on the academic track is 52 percent, as opposed to 39 and 43 percent on pre-vocational and vocational tracks. The differences are even higher in European countries that give the majority of the subsamples we used to estimate the direct effect of tracking.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hungarian National Research Development and Innovation Fund [grant number K109338] and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant number 691676 (EdEN)].

Notes on contributors

Zoltán Hermann

Zoltán Hermann is a research fellow at the Institute of Economics of Centre for Economic and Regional Studies (IE/CERS) and an associate professor at the Centre for Labour Economics of Corvinus University of Budapest. His main research interests are economics of education and local public economics, especially the production of human capital, inequalities in education and educational institutions, policy evaluation and financing education.

Marianna Kopasz

Marianna Kopasz is a research fellow at the Institute for Political Science, Centre for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Corvinus University of Budapest. Her main research interests comprise child welfare, social policy, and educational policy.