India Shining and Bharat Drowning : Comparing Two Indian States to the Worldwide Distribution in Mathematics Achievement

Das, Jishnu ; Zajonc, Tristan

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACHIEVEMENT;    ACHIEVEMENTS;    APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY;    ATTENTION;    AVERAGE SCORE;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-4644
RP-ID  :  WPS4644

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper uses student answers topublicly released questions from an international testingagency together with statistical methods from Item ResponseTheory to place secondary students from two Indian states-Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution ofmathematics achievement. These two states fall below 43 ofthe 51 countries for which data exist. The bottom 5 percentof children rank higher than the bottom 5 percent in onlythree countries-South Africa, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. Butnot all students test poorly. Inequality in the test-scoredistribution for both states is next only to South Africa inthe worldwide ranking exercise. Consequently, and to theextent that these two states can represent India, the twostatements "for every ten top performers in the UnitedStates there are four in India" and "for every tenlow performers in the United States there are two hundred inIndia" are both consistent with the data. Thecombination of India's size and large variance inachievement give both the perceptions that India is shiningeven as Bharat, the vernacular for India, is drowning.Comparable estimates of inequalities in learning are thebuilding blocks for substantive research on the correlatesof earnings inequality in India and other low-incomecountries; the methods proposed here allow for independenttesting exercises to build up such data by linking scores tointernationally comparable tests.