IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v76y2024i2p533-560..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The role of student effort on performance in PISA: revisiting the gender gap in achievement

Author

Listed:
  • Lina M Anaya
  • Gema Zamarro

Abstract

International assessments are important to benchmark the quality of education internationally. However, ignoring students’ efforts in low-stakes tests can lead to biased interpretations of test performance. We use data from the PISA to analyse the potential role of student effort in explaining gender achievement gaps across countries. We build two effort measures based on students’ response times to test questions (i.e. rapid-guessing rates) and the student effort on the post-test survey (i.e. item non-response rates). We find a strong association between student efforts and test scores. After accounting for differences in effort, the estimated gender achievement gap in mathematics and science could be up to 36% and 40% of an standard deviation wider, respectively, in favour of boys. Altogether, our effort measures on average explain between 51% and 56% of the cross-country variation in test scores.

Suggested Citation

  • Lina M Anaya & Gema Zamarro, 2024. "The role of student effort on performance in PISA: revisiting the gender gap in achievement," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 76(2), pages 533-560.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:76:y:2024:i:2:p:533-560.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpad018
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • C83 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology; Computer Programs - - - Survey Methods; Sampling Methods

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:76:y:2024:i:2:p:533-560.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.