PISA 2012 – Economic, Social, and Cultural Status
It has been known for a while that academic performance is positively correlated with economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS). The causal factors that influence inequality in educational outcome are likely to be byproducts or sources of the variation in ESCS.
Using the PISA 2012 survey results for only the USA, the influence of ESCS on student performance in mathematics, science, and reading, was modeling using a quantile regression approach for recursive structural equations (Ma and Koenker, 2006). The model was constructed with ESCS as the structural effect of interest. Home educational resources, cultural possessions , wealth , and parent’s education were used to model ESCS (Y). This effect was then introduced into the a model of student scores (y). The explicit model follows,
where i=1,…,10,294 and represents the structural effect of ESCS evaluated at several different quantile combinations. Five quantiles of ESCS were considered (0.1,0.25,0.5,0.75,0.9) and 9 quantiles …