Test Score Gap Robustness to Scaling : The Scale Transformation Command
Social scientists frequently rely on the cardinal comparability of test scores to assess achievement gaps between population subgroups and their evolution over time. This approach has been criticized due to the ordinal nature of test scores and th...
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| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/942501566218257874/Test-Score-Gap-Robustness-to-Scaling-The-Scale-Transformation-Command http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32311 |
| Summary: | Social scientists frequently rely on the
cardinal comparability of test scores to assess achievement
gaps between population subgroups and their evolution over
time. This approach has been criticized due to the ordinal
nature of test scores and the sensibility of results to
order-preserving transformations, which are theoretically
plausible. Bond and Lang (2013) document the sensitivity of
measured ability to scaling choices and develop a method to
assess the robustness of changes in ability over time to
scaling choices. This paper presents the scale
transformation command, which expands the Bond and Lang
method to more general cases and optimizes their algorithm
to work with large data sets. The program assesses the
robustness of an achievement gap between two subgroups to
any arbitrary choice of scale by finding bounds for the
original gap estimation. Additionally, the program finds
scale transformations that are very likely and unlikely to
benchmark against the results obtained. Finally, the program
also allows the user to measure how much gap growth
coefficients change when including controls in their specifications. |
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