Trends in socioeconomic achievement gaps in the macroeconomic context: Discussion and future research

Abstract

Using the 20 years of comparable data collected by the IEA’s Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), this study aimed to identify and describe possible relationships between trends in the inequality of educational opportunities related to the differing socioeconomic status (SES) of the students. Thirteen educational systems were assessed as having sufficiently comparable data for the purposes of this research and a modified version of the TIMSS home educational resources (HER) index was developed for the analyses. Country-level indicators, such as centralization of educational systems, gross domestic product per person, government expenditure on education, a country’s Gini index, and the top 10% of earners’ share of pre-tax national income, provided additional relevant information. The research revealed some tentative patterns that may be worthy of deeper investigation. In the second decade of TIMSS (2003–2015), larger reductions in the achievement gap between low- and high-SES students tended to accompany steeper increases in the overall TIMSS performance in the corresponding education systems. There were also some indications that this may be associated with the level of centralization of an educational system and trends in country-level spending on education; this needs to be confirmed by further research as only broad connections were made with such macro-level indicators. Future research could usefully analyze the measurement invariance of the modified SES index used in the study, or investigate the potential of reconstructing the established TIMSS HER index so it can be confidently applied to analyses across all TIMSS administrations.