The effects of early between-school tracking on gender segregation and gender gaps in achievement: a differences-in-differences study

ABSTRACT

We investigated effects of tracking students into higher, more academic, and lower, less academic, school types immediately after primary school (early tracking) instead of having a comprehensive secondary school system (late tracking) on school gender segregation and gender gaps in achievement outcomes. We assumed that, in early tracking countries, girls are more frequently selected into more academic school types, which leads to more school segregation by gender and achievement advantages of girls over boys. In a differences-in-differences design, we compared secondary-school-level gender inequalities between early and late tracking countries, after controlling for primary-school-level differences. We investigated 787 country-by-year observations in 33 matches of primary- and secondary-school-level data sets from three international large-scale assessments. As expected, we found that early tracking increased the degree of school gender segregation. Not conforming to expectations, the evidence did not indicate that tracking had effects on gender gaps in achievement.

KEYWORDS:

• Early tracking
• late tracking
• differences-in-differences
• gender gaps
• gender segregation

Acknowledgements

We thank Roisin Cronin for copy-editing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

All data are freely available from https://timssandpirls.bc.edu/ and https://www.oecd.org/pisa/

Notes

1 We use the term “school mark” instead of “school grade” to avoid confusion with grade levels.

2 In the following, the term “country” is short for both country and benchmarking participant.

3 For the estimation of individual-level models, data from different studies are pooled and the achievement scores are treated as if they had the same metric. This is generally not the case. For example, the PIRLS and PISA achievement scales were each transformed to an international mean of 500 with a standard deviation of 100. This does not imply that the actual performance of primary and secondary students is on average the same but is merely the result of the (arbitrary) transformation of the achievement scales. The two-step approach on country-level models circumvents this issue as the secondary school measures are on the right-hand side of the equation and the primary school measures are on the left-hand side (see Contini & Cugnata, 2020, for further detail).

4 Excluded late tracking countries with large shares of single-sex schools were Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Malta, New Zealand, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Excluded early tracking countries were Ireland, the Republic of Korea, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement number 765400.

Notes on contributors

Isa Steinmann

Isa Steinmann is an associate professor at the Department of Primary and Secondary Teacher Education at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. One strand of her research focuses on how education systems and schools affect student achievement and educational inequality outcomes. In this field, she enjoys applying methods that aim for causal inference from large-scale assessment data. Another strand of her research interests concerns how properties of international large-scale assessments are linked to their results and interact with respondents.

Andrés Strello

Andrés Strello is a senior research analyst at the Research and Analysis Unit of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and a PhD student at the Center for Research on Education and School Development (IFS) at TU Dortmund University in Germany. His research focuses on the study of educational inequalities from a comparative perspective, mainly using pseudo-experimental designs with international large-scale assessments data.

Rolf Strietholt

Rolf Strietholt is co-head of the Research and Analysis Unit of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), and he is also affiliated with the Center for Research on Education and School Development (IFS) at TU Dortmund University in Germany. His research focuses on educational effectiveness research, educational measurement, and comparative education.