Child poverty and academic skills at the national level: A longitudinal analysis of four waves of PISA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much research has examined school-related sources of cross-national variation in academic skills, but we know far less about the role that broader socioeconomic conditions play. In this study, we examine how nations’ child poverty rates associate with their overall scores on international assessments of academic skills over time. We first establish theoretically why and how child poverty might undermine overall academic skills at the national level. We then use pooled time-series data on 40 nations that participated in four recent waves of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to analyze the impact of changes in child poverty rates on changes in nations’ overall academic skills ( N = 160 nation-years). Two-way fixed-effects models find support for two hypotheses and, to a lesser extent, a third: As child poverty increases within nations over time, (1) mean academic skills decrease, (2) the percentage of low-skilled students increases, and (3) the percentage of high-skilled students decreases (for math only). We conclude by discussing the theoretical and political implications of the findings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".