The Role of Gender and Tracking in Student Achievement at the Extremes

The following is the abstract of a recent paper I wrote analyzing student performance data. Here is a link to the entire paper.http://dl.dropbox.com/u/33186846/Student%20Achievement%20at%20Extremes.pdfMeasurement of student achievement is at the heart of educational policy and standardized testing has been both supported and contested as a genuine representation of student achievement. This study shows that the interpretations of standardized testing may have starkly contrasting meanings for different cohorts of students. By using quantile regression to account for conditional PSAT scores, educational factors such as gender and tracking are shown to effect students in varying ways. For the students in this study, gender was a significant indicator of performance on the PSAT test, with being male accounting for more than a five point “bump.” The conclusion from the quantile regressions is that students with extreme PSAT scores are outliers based on ability or inability, not because of their gender. Meanwhile, students that participated in the “honors” tracking system had more of an increase in their predicted score the higher their conditional PSAT score.