The shape of educational inequality
The shape of educational inequality
复制标题
教育不平等的形态
作者:
Christopher L. Quarles;Ceren Budak;P. Resnick
The ability of community college students to be successful is conceptualized, measured, and shown to be exponentially distributed. Hundreds of thousands of students drop out of school each year in the United States, despite billions of dollars of funding and myriad educational reforms. Existing research tends to look at the effect of easily measurable student characteristics. However, a vast number of harder-to-measure student traits, skills, and resources affect educational success. We present a conceptual framework for the cumulative effect of all factors, which we call student capital. We develop a method for estimating student capital in groups of students and find that student capital is distributed exponentially in each of 140 cohorts of community college students. Students’ ability to be successful does not behave like standard tests of intelligence. Instead, it acts like a limited resource, distributed unequally. The results suggest that rather than removing barriers related to easily measured characteristics, interventions should be focused on building up the skills and resources needed to be successful in school.
影响因子:
10.5
作者:
Killewald A;Pfeffer FT;Schachner JN
通讯作者:
Schachner JN