Fernando Martínez Abad fma@usal.esAlicia Alelí Chaparro-Caso achaparro@uabc.edu.mxLuis Lizasoain-Hernández luis.lizasoain@ehu.es

ENLACE tests• Generalization of large-scale tests of the achievement at the national

and international level (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, …).• ENLACE tests are developed throughout Mexico.

ENLACE emerged with the idea to generate information about student knowledge and abilities, with the purpose of providing support to implement effective and relevant processes of educational planning and public policies.

Contextual variablesParallel with the importance assigned to these large-scale performance tests appears the concern about the control of some differential variables which are not controlled by the school institutions:

CONTEXTUAL VARIABLES

Variables like nationality, gender, punctuality and class attendance or eating, hygiene and cultural patterns are included in the contextual variables

Socioeconomic levelOne of the contextual variables that has the best impact due to its influence over the academic performance is:

SOCIOECONOMIC INDEX

can be broadly defined as one’s Access to financial, social, cultural and human capital resources. Traditionally a student’s SEI has included, as components, parental educational attainment, parental occupational status and household or family income, with appropriate adjustment for household or family composition. An expanded SEI measure could include measures of additional household, neighborhood, and school resources (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012)

Socioeconomic levelThus, the socioeconomic level is considered as a measurable latent variable from several observables. For example, OECD, in the application tests of PISA, introduces a questionnaire of context to obtain a socioeconomic index, called "PISA index of economic, social and cultural status” (OECD & Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2010), which integrates, through an analysis of the main components, the following variables:

• Possessions at home (cultural, educational resources, books…). • Educational level of parents.• Parents’ work status.

Objectives of the studyTherefore, the aims of this research are:

• Design an index of the socioeconomic status of students and schools from context questionnaires applied in the State of Baja California (Mexico) from the Educational Assessment Unit of Institute of Educational Research and Development of University of Baja California.

• Evaluate its level in relation with the students and schools results in mathematics, obtained from tests ENLACE.

METHOD: Participants• POPULATION

Students in second and third year of Secondary Education in the State of Baja California (Mexico).

• SAMPLERandom initial representative sample of 6765 students and 78 schools from Ensenada, Mexicali, Playas de Rosarito, Tecate and Tijuana is obtained.

METHOD: Instruments• ENLACE 2010

ENLACE 2010 is a standardized objective test which is applied to the whole population registered in the census of Mexico, and it offers an individual diagnosis about the students in some of curriculum subjects.

• INTEGRAL ASSESSMENT STRATEGY 2010Performed from the Educational Assessment Unit of the Institute of Educational Research and Development. The IAS included 6 dimensions, show below.

METHOD: Variables• In the construction of the socioeconomic index, there are

included some variables:• Overcrowding index• Basic resources at home• General resources at home• Educational resources at home• Mother and father’s scholarly studies• Attendance to cultural events• Health and food habits

Overcrowding index Basic resources at home

Educational resources at homeGeneral resources at home

METHOD: Procedure1. Construction of the socioeconomic index based on

recommendations of institutions and scientific literature.

2. Variable discretization based on the socioeconomic structure in the state of Baja California (Consulta Mitofsky, 2010).

3. Analysis of the correlation indexes obtained in both variables of the socioeconomic index (ordinal and continuous).

¿The discretization of the socioeconomic variable based on the socioeconomic structure will improve the behavior of the variable?

METHOD: Data analysis• Principal component analysis for the construction of the

socioeconomic index.

• Pearson correlation coefficient to analyze the relation between the initial socioeconomic index and the final score in ENLACE tests.

RESULTS: PCA• 9 observed variables.• Forcing the extraction of 1 factor.• 39 % of explained variance with the 1º component (autovalue = 3.45)

Scree Plot from principal component analysis

RESULTS: ENLACE vs Socioec.

Density Plot. ENLACE & Continuous socioeconomic index

RESULTS: ENLACE vs Socioec.

Means Plot. ENLACE & Ordinal socioeconomic index

RESULTS: Pearson’s correlation

rxy stud. p stud rxy sch. p sch

Continuous .272 <.001 .597 <.001

Ordinal (status)

.276 <.001 .635 <.001

Difference (abs)

.004 t=0.923p=.187 .038 t=2.843

p=.003

Conclusions• Governments and public institutions increase their concern

about the quality control, and accordingly, the large-scale assessments are increasing.

• Use of contextual variables is essential to obtain comparable measures about the real achievement of schools and students. In special, socioeconomic index has an enormous importance in this field.

• Socioeconomic index, although is significantly correlated in most of international researches, not represent, exactly, social structural differences between countries.

• Regard, empiric evidence confirm that the categorization of this index based on region structure improve the explicative level.

Fernando Martínez Abad fma@usal.esAlicia Alelí Chaparro-Caso achaparro@uabc.edu.mxLuis Lizasoain-Hernández luis.lizasoain@ehu.es