Background
A basic goal of education systems is to guarantee all children equal educational opportunities. Nevertheless, substantial gaps in Norwegian students’ educational attainment exist related to students’ gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background and/or to contextual characteristics such as neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics or school quality. Furthermore, there is particularly scant knowledge regarding whether reforms of the Norwegian school system had effects with respect to educational inequality.
Objectives
- To disentangle the causal mechanisms behind achievement gaps and academic resilience in education by jointly examining individual and context effects on skill development.
- To examine the development of educational inequalities during schooling and over the life-course.
- To disentangle the development of educational inequalities from societal developments.
- To examine whether reforms of the Norwegian school system had any effects with respect to educational equality and resilience
- To disentangle educational and societal inequalities from measurement effects caused through bias by examining the fairness of educational attainment measures.
Methodology
We will use anonymized linked data on individuals comprising the entire population of Norway since 1970. The data comes from national registries in Norway and external data sets, and Statistics Norway links and anonymizes all data sets before releasing them for research use.
Undertaking the research tasks in this project requires broadening our horizon beyond one framework. For example, disentangling individual and context effects on educational attainment calls for the use of quasi-experimental methods, while developing and validating indicators of equality and equity appropriate for the data at hand advise the use of psychometric methods such as IRT.
Sub-projects
- Predictive Validity of Secondary-Education Attainment Measures in Norway (ph.d-prosjekt)
- Is GPA fair? An investigation into inter-subject difficulty using Norwegian registry data (PhD-project)
- Master Thesis by Sverre B. Ofstad:
Using 2019 Norwegian senior high school grades, my master thesis applies item response theory to estimate GPA subject difficulties, with explicit consideration of self-selection biases.
Cooperation
- EQOP-Socioeconomic gaps in language development and school achievement: Mechanisms of inequality and opportunity
- ArcEd: The Choice Architecture of Admission to Education
Personal Data
Our analyses will be based on Register data where individuals have been anonymized and from which only aggregate results will be published. If you can be identified in the data material, you have the right to:
- Gain insight into which personal information is registered about you
- Have your personal information corrected
- Have your personal information deleted
- Gain a copy of your personal information, and
- Send a complaint to “personvernombudet” or “Datatilsynet” about how your personal data are handled
If you have questions regarding the study or wish to exercise your rights as registered person, you can contact:
- Rolf Vegar Olsen, r.v.olsen@cemo.uio.no
- UiO's Personal Data Officer at personvernombud@uio.no