PDF Global Data Set on Education Quality (1965-2015)

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Policy Research Working Paper

WPS8314 8314

Global Data Set on Education Quality (1965?2015)

Nadir Altinok Noam Angrist Harry Anthony Patrinos

Public Disclosure Authorized

Public Disclosure Authorized

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Education Global Practice Group January 2018

Policy Research Working Paper 8314

Abstract

This paper presents the largest globally comparable panel database of education quality. The database includes 163 countries and regions over 1965?2015. The globally comparable achievement outcomes were constructed by linking standardized, psychometrically-robust international and regional achievement tests. The paper contributes to the literature in the following ways: (1) it is the largest and most current globally comparable data set, covering more than 90 percent of the global population; (2) the data set includes 100 developing areas and the most developing countries included in such a data set to date--the countries that have the most to gain from the potential benefits of a high-quality education; (3) the data set contains credible measures of globally comparable achievement distributions as well as mean scores; (4) the data set uses multiple methods to link assessments, including mean and percentile linking methods, thus enhancing the robustness of the data set; (5) the data set includes the standard errors for the estimates, enabling explicit quantification of the degree of reliability

of each estimate; and (6) the data set can be disaggregated across gender, socioeconomic status, rural/urban, language, and immigration status, thus enabling greater precision and equity analysis. A first analysis of the data set reveals a few important trends: learning outcomes in developing countries are often clustered at the bottom of the global scale; although variation in performance is high in developing countries, the top performers still often perform worse than the bottom performers in developed countries; gender gaps are relatively small, with high variation in the direction of the gap; and distributions reveal meaningfully different trends than mean scores, with less than 50 percent of students reaching the global minimum threshold of proficiency in developing countries relative to 86 percent in developed countries. The paper also finds a positive and significant association between educational achievement and economic growth. The data set can be used to benchmark global progress on education quality, as well as to uncover potential drivers of education quality, growth, and development.

This paper is a product of the Education Global Practice Group. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at . The authors may be contacted at hpatrinos@ .

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

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Global Data Set on Education Quality (1965-2015)

Nadir Altinok*, Noam Angrist, Harry Anthony Patrinos (1)

Key words: Quality, Human Capital, Education, International, Achievement, Database, PISA, TIMSS, SACMEQ, PASEC, LLECE. JEL Classification: C8, I2, N3, J24, O15

(1) * Corresponding author, Nadir Altinok, BETA, CNRS & University of Lorraine (France), Address: BETA, UFR Droit, Sciences Economiques et Gestion 13 place Carnot C.O. 70026 - 54035 Nancy cedex, France. Tel: +33 372 748 452. Email nadir.altinok@univ-lorraine.fr Noam Angrist, Oxford University, Email noam.angrist@bsg.ox.ac.uk Harry Patrinos, The World Bank, Email Hpatrinos@ Support from the World Bank's Research Support Budget is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed here are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the World Bank Group.

Introduction

A country's education level is critical for its economics success. For many years, the economics literature focused on the positive effects of education quantity on growth (Barro, 1991; Mankiw, 1992). However, a growing body of evidence suggests it is not only the quantity of schooling, measured by average years of schooling or enrollment rates, but also the quality of schooling, proxied by student achievement tests, that contributes to growth. It is not about being in school but what is learned in school that matters. Over 15 years of literature now supports this conclusion (Hanushek and Kimko, 2000; Pritchett, 2001; Hanushek and Woessmann, 2008; Hanushek and Woessmann, 2012). The evidence shows that in cross-country regressions when student achievement conditional on years of schooling ? rather than years of schooling alone is correlated with growth, the association and explanatory power of growth models is significantly higher. The most recent World Development Report (World Bank, 2017) highlights this finding. Moreover, Hanushek and Woessmann (2012) use differences-indifferences and instrumental variables methods and find a plausibly causal link between cognitive skills and growth.

This insight comes at a time when the availability and coverage of International Student Achievement Tests (ISATs) ? which are carefully constructed, psychometrically-tested, standardized assessments ? is growing. ISATs first started in the 1960s and are carried out by institutions such as the OECD and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). One of the largest ISATs, PISA, covered 71 countries in 2015, and another large ISAT, TIMSS, covered 65 countries in 2015. The growth of these assessments enables credible global comparison of education quality levels and changes over time.

While critically useful, these international achievement tests have a series of limitations. First, while PISA and TIMSS tests are highly correlated (Rindermann and Stephen, 2009), they have meaningful differences in both their rigor and scaling. Thus, when comparing them, it is important to adjust for these differences. Second, since these assessments only started being implemented consistently and in a standardized fashion in the 1990s and 2000s, they are limited in their ability to conduct longitudinal and panel analysis. Third, these assessments often include mostly OECD countries, omitting developing countries which have the most to gain from a quality education. For example, the first PISA in 2000 included 28 OECD countries and four non-OECD countries. While PISA has grown substantially, and in 2015 included 71 countries, none of these countries where from Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, implications of studies

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analyzing PISA and TIMSS results are limited in their inclusion of and application to developing countries. Despite these drawbacks, ISATs provide a strong foundation to obtain globally comparable estimates of education quality.

We build on a literature that aims to produce comparable estimates of cognitive skills across countries and over time, leveraging the emergence and growth of ISATs, and proposing methodological innovations to deal with some of the shortcomings listed above. Our methodology builds on seminal work done by Barro and Lee (1996) and Barro (2001) and provides a global update of previous papers (Altinok and Murseli, 2007, Angrist, Patrinos and Schlotter, 2013, Altinok, Diebolt, de Meulemeester, 2014; Altinok, 2017). We also build on methodologies used by Hanushek and Kimko (2000) as well as extensions by Barro and Lee (2015), Hanushek and Woessmann (2012) and Hanushek and Woessmann (2016).

In a pioneering paper, Barro and Lee (2001) used a simple regression technique to obtain different constants between each test, thus allowing for test differences. Hanushek and Kimko (2000) then created more credible over-time comparisons by adjusting ISATs between 19641995 using the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the United States as an anchor, since the United States participated in both the NAEP and each ISAT. To this end, they use the United States' performance in NAEP over time to adjust for varying difficulty and scaling across ISATs and construct comparable over-time achievement data. Recent work by Hanushek and Woessmann (2016) aims to address issues of equating variation across ISATs in addition to equating levels. To do this, the authors express performance in terms of standard deviations and project the standard deviation of a relatively homogenous and stable group of OECD countries ? termed the "OECD Standardization Group" (OSG) of countries ? and then transform these standard deviations into scores using the standardized PISA scale.12 However, as the authors acknowledge, this does not apply for countries far off the OSG scale since ISATs may be too difficult and irrelevant for this sub-set of countries, distorting the variance equating exercise. This bias is particularly important for analyses focused on developing countries.

Altinok and Murseli (2007) provide the first attempt to include a significant number of developing countries in internationally comparable estimates. Many developing countries do not participate in international tests such as PISA and TIMSS. However, they do participate in

1 The criteria chosen for the "OECD Standardization Group (OSG)" includes: the countries have to be member states of the relatively homogenous and economically advanced group of OECD countries over all ISATs observations. Second, the countries should have had a substantial enrollment in secondary education in 1964. 2The OSG countries are: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

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