Abstract
Using a nationally representative sample of 1,189 immigrant youth in American high schools, we examine whether the quality of education in their country of origin is related to post-migration math achievement in the 9th grade. To measure the quality of their education in the country of origin, we use country-specific average test scores from two international assessments: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). We find that the average PISA or TIMSS scores for immigrant youth’s country of origin are positively associated with their performance on the 9th grade post-migration math assessment. We also find that each year spent in the United States is positively associated with performance on the 9th grade post-migration math assessment, but this effect is strongest for immigrants from countries with low PISA/TIMSS scores.
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Notes
All reported unweighted sample sizes are rounded to the nearest one-tenth to conform to the NCES disclosure review guidelines.
Two exceptions to our imputation approach are China and Mexico. China did not participate in either international assessment. We assign Hong Kong’s scores to China, assuming that the quality of schools in Hong Kong is similar to the quality of schools in China. Mexico does not participate in PISA but did participate in the 1995 TIMSS. After the tests had been administered and graded, the Mexican government decided to withdraw its participation. As a result, all data were destroyed, and Mexico’s mean score on the TIMSS scale was never released. However, the Mexican government retained the original tests and eventually released the percentage of correct answers on different subscales of the assessment. To impute Mexico’s overall score for our analysis, we used the percentage of correct answers on these subscales as predictors in addition to the demographic and economic development indicators.
The collapsing of countries into regions is to satisfy reporting requirements from the National Center for Education Statistics: cells with n < 20 cannot be shown in order to prevent potential disclosure of study participants’ identity.
We subtracted the U.S. score from each country’s score and then divided the value by the standard deviation from the U.S. score (i.e., the square root of the mean of the squared deviations from the U.S. score).
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a generous grant to the authors from the Spencer Foundation (#201200043). The views expressed in the text are the authors’ own and may not, under any circumstances, be interpreted as stating an official position of the RAND Corporation or the European Commission.
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Bozick, R., Malchiodi, A. & Miller, T. Premigration School Quality, Time Spent in the United States, and the Math Achievement of Immigrant High School Students. Demography 53, 1477–1498 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0497-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-016-0497-3