22/02/2018, Washington, DC, USA
Organized by the Education Division of the Inter-American Development Bank, this brown bag lunch presentation discusses the Global Data Set on Education Quality. The database includes 163 countries and regions over the period 1965–2015. The globally comparable achievement outcomes were constructed by linking standardized, psychometrically-robust international and regional achievement tests. Learning outcomes in developing countries are often clustered at the bottom of the global scale. Although variation in performance is high in developing countries, the top performers still often perform worse than the bottom performers in developed countries. Gender gaps are relatively small. The distributions reveal meaningfully different trends than mean scores, with less than 50 percent of students reaching the global minimum threshold of proficiency in developing countries relative to 86 percent in developed countries. The paper also finds a positive and significant association between educational achievement and economic growth…more
