Artur Pokropek

Education and Self-Reported Health: Evidence from 23 Countries on the Role of Years of Schooling, Cognitive Skills and Social Capital

We examine the contribution of human capital to health in 23 countries worldwide using the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, a unique large-scale international assessment of 16–65 year olds that contains information about self-reported health, schooling, cognitive skills and indicators of interpersonal trust, which represents the cognitive dimension of social capital. We identify cross-national differences in education, skill and social capital gradients in self-reported health and explore the interaction between human capital and social capital to examine if and where social capital is a mediator or a moderator of years of schooling and cognitive abilities. We find large education gaps in self-reported health across all countries in our sample and a strong positive relationship between self-reported health and both literacy and trust in the majority of countries. Education and skill gradients in self-reported health appear to be largest in the United States and smallest in Italy, France, Sweden and Finland. On average around 5.5% of both the schooling gap in self-reported health and the literacy gap in self-reported health can be explained by the higher levels of interpersonal trust that better educated/more skilled individuals have, although the mediating role of trust varies considerably across countries. We find no evidence of a moderation effect: the relationships between health and years of schooling and health and cognitive skills are similar among individuals with different levels of trust.

Grade of Membership Response Time Model for Detecting Guessing Behaviors

A response model that is able to detect guessing behaviors and produce unbiased estimates in low-stake conditions using timing information is proposed. The model is a special case of the grade of membership model in which responses are modeled as partial members of a class that is affected by motivation and a class that responds only according to the level of ability. Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to compare the proposed model with an approach that ignored guessing and an approach based on item filtering. In each simulated condition, the proposed model outperformed the other approaches by showing the lowest level of bias and the highest precision of item and persons estimates. Finally, the model was estimated using real life data from Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies research (PIAAC). The results showed slight but expected corrections for the levels of proficiency in all countries.

Will the last be first and the first last? The role of classroom registers in cognitive skill acquisition

The paper estimates the effect of students’ position in the classroom register on their academic performance. We use a unique dataset from Poland which contains information on the academic outcomes of students in the humanities, science and mathematics lower secondary school exams as well as the position students occupy in their classroom register. We find that students whose names are recorded near the end of the class list have lower performance than those students whose names are recorded near the beginning of the list. The effect appears to be larger for performance in the humanities exam, and for low-achieving boys who attend large classes.

Science career plans of adolescents: patterns, trends and gender divides

As STEM workers work in the technologically most advanced and potentially most productive sectors of the labour market, meeting the future demand for STEM skills is considered high priority in the European Union. Knowing that a strong pathway dependency exists between STEM education and employment, in this report we examine STEM-related occupational expectations of adolescents to understand their ability and willingness to undertake STEM training and work. We systematically explore a range of potential influences on young people’s career plans starting from the individual characteristics of adolescents and their families, accounting for various features of school environments as well as country characteristics and policy interventions at a national level. For the analyses, we use PISA data from 2006 and 2015 surveys for each of the European Member States which allow for identifying the changes as well as continuity in adolescent preferences during this 10-year period. The past ten years have not brought about major changes in European students’ career orientations towards the STEM. In 2015 on average 20 out of 100 of 15-years old students in Europe declared to pursuit a science-related career in STEM occupations. However considerable differences across countries exist. In Finland for instance, only 12 out of 100 students are interested in STEM careers while in Slovenia 27 out of 100 students expect such careers. Expectations of STEM career plan are strongly divided by gender. On average in Europe, only 10 out of 100 females are interested in STEM careers while the number of boys expecting a similar career is almost triple. Between-country differences are remarkable. In Finland only 4 out of 100 female students want to engage into STEM while in Latvia the number of females that see their future in a STEM occupation is 4 times higher. Students develop their career plans differently across the different educational systems in Europe. In most countries, students who are on a vocational track at the age of 15 are increasingly interested in choosing a STEM job. Our findings suggest also a positive association between compulsory national examination in math and students’ plans to enter a STEM occupation. In terms of policy measures designed to mitigate the gender gap in the supply of young people available to train for employment in the STEM sector, the patterns presented in this report indicate an urgent need to develop more effective methods to encourage girls to consider STEM employment as a viable option for their own future.

Seeing is believing: Task-exposure specificity and the development of mathematics self-efficacy evaluations.

We examine the relevance of task exposure specificity in the development of self-efficacy evaluations among 15-year-old students in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. We use data from the 2012 edition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to assess if students’ self-efficacy evaluations with respect to a set of mathematics tasks are associated with how frequently they encountered those same tasks or tasks requiring them to apply similar processes or procedures. We find evidence of task exposure specificity in the development of self-efficacy evaluations toward both applied and pure mathematics problems. The relationship between task exposure and self-efficacy evaluations is not moderated by students’ socioeconomic status (SES) or anxiety toward mathematics. Exposure to easy items appears to be more strongly associated with the development of self-efficacy among high achieving students and exposure to pure mathematics problems is more strongly associated with the development of self-efficacy among girls.

Birthplace diversity, income inequality and education gradients in generalised trust: variations in the relevance of cognitive skills across 29 countries

The paper examines between-country differences in the mechanisms through which education could promote generalised trust using data from 29 countries participating in the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). Results indicate that education is strongly associated with generalised trust and that a large part of this association is mediated by individuals’ literacy skills, income and occupational prestige. However, education gradients in levels of generalised trust and in the extent to which they are due to social stratification mechanisms or cognitive skills mechanisms vary across countries. Social diversity, indicated by the presence and diversity of migrant populations and levels of income inequality, explain between country differences in the direct and indirect effects of education on trust. In particular, the relationship between literacy skills and generalised trust is stronger in the presence of more and more diverse migrant populations but is weaker in the presence of greater income inequality.

On the Cross-Country Comparability of Indicators of Socioeconomic Resources in PISA

ABSTRACT Large-scale international assessments rely on indicators of the resources that students report having in their homes to capture the financial capital of their families. The scaling methodology currently used to develop the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) background indices is designed to maximize within-country comparability over time. However, questions remain on the extent to which alternative scaling methodologies can ensure greater cross-country comparability. Establishing indicators of household resources that are comparable both across countries and over time is fundamental to assessing cross-country differences in socioeconomic inequalities in academic achievement. We use multigroup confirmatory factor analysis for categorical variables to examine the measurement equivalence of the household resource factors across the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries that participated in the PISA 2000 and 2012 cycles. We construct a series of alternative measures that use students’ reports on the availability of household resources and compare them to the index of home possessions that is generally used in analyses of PISA data. Our findings show that alternative scaling methodologies can be useful in developing cross-country indicators of socioeconomic status.

Regional variation in the effect of schooling on people's incomes in Poland

Abstract The analysis, based on a Polish national sample from 2006, aims to cast light on the regional variation in the effect of education on incomes. Building on the conceptual framework developed in the theory of human capital we investigate to what extent pay-offs for human capital differ across detailed administrative districts in Poland. By incorporating contextual characteristics, we examine how micro- and macro-level factors shape labour market outcomes. Our findings provide further support for the hypothesis that there is much regional variation in the influence of education on incomes, which suggests that there are better and worse places for the development of a meritocratic distribution of incomes. It appears that education pays more highly in more economically-developed regions, marked by a higher rate of occupational activity.