Test Score Measurement and the Black-White Test Score Gap

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Penney, Jeffrey
• 署名单位: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6535
• DOI: 10.1162/REST_a_00651
• 发表日期: 2017-10
• 页码: 652-656
• 关键词: regressions

摘要

Research as to the size of the black-white test score gap often comes to contradictory conclusions. Recent literature has affirmed that the source of these contradictions and other controversies in education economics may be due to the fact that test scores contain only ordinal information. In this paper, I propose a normalization of test scores that is invariant to monotonic transformations. Under fairly weak assumptions, this metric has interval properties and thus solves the ordinality problem. The measure can serve as a valuable robustness check to ensure that any results are not simply statistical artifacts from the choice of scale.