A new look at the association between socioeconomic status and educational outcomes in International Large-Scale Assessments

Two of the main criticisms to studies based on secondary analyses of International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSA) in education are their lack of theoretical background to formulate the hypotheses that they test, and the alleged lack of comparability of the constructs that they postulate (i.e. whether constructs like socioeconomic status can be validly compared across countries). The main purpose of this paper is to use data from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to address these criticisms by: 1) using the items included in the PISA background questionnaires and Multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MGCFA) to create a SES scale based on Bourdieu’s reproduction theory (i.e. latent variables measuring students’ economic, social
and cultural capital); 2) testing the measurement invariance of these constructs across the countries participating in PISA; and 3) using a set of Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM) to test and compare the association of SES with mathematics achievement in each of the countries participating in PISA. The importance of this study is given by, as mentioned above, addressing two of the main criticisms posed on ILSAs and by identifying potential theoretical mechanisms explaining the well-established association between SES and academic outcomes using ILSA data.