What Do Test Score Really Mean? A Latent Class Analysis of Danish Test Score Performance

Abstract

Latent class Poisson count models are used to analyse a sample of Danish test score results from a cohort of individuals born in 1954-1955, tested in 1968, and followed until 2011. The procedure takes account of unobservable effects as well as excessive zeros in the data. We show that the test scores measure manifest or measured ability as it has evolved over the life of the respondent and is, thus, more a product of the socioeconomic status of the parents and the human capital formation process than some latent or fundamental measure of pure cognitive ability. We find that variables which are not closely associated with traditional notions of intelligence explain a significant proportion of the variation in test scores. This adds to the complexity of interpreting test scores and suggests that school culture and possible incentive problems make it more difficult to understand what the tests measure.

Field theory in cultural capital studies of educational attainment

“…The growing research tradition trying to assess the (isolated) effects of cognitive and non-cognitive skills respectively on educational attainment engages in an analytical 'slicing and dicing' that from a CCT perspective is unlikely to produce tenable sociological results since in practice the relationship between cognitive and non-cognitive skills is one of mutual dependency, of application in a specific social context, and one depending on the system in which this context is situated. Even 'pure logic' would always be socially situated, applied and combined with a practical sense of the subject at hand, as is indicated in several studies showing that even sophisticated measures of IQ are biased by such factors as gender, geography, and social origin, indicating that some 'culture of testing' is at stake even in the most isolated accounts of cognition (for example, Fritts and Marszalek 2010;McIntosh and Munk 2014). Rather than denying altogether that there is such a thing as IQ, the concept of habitus allows it to be socially contextualized, notably by approaching the 'relationship between classed environments and schemes of language, thought, and modes of specialized cognition' (Nash 2003, 446).…”

Completion of Upper Secondary Education: What Mechanisms are at Stake?

“…As resources are clearly inherited, researchers have focused on the role of inheritance of parents' ability in this process, as suggested by Savage and Egerton (1997), for instance. While the dimension of ability is important because actual skills are determined to some degree by ability, concepts such as ability and intelligence quotient (IQ) are seen as controversial in the literature (Borghans et al, 2008;Loehlin, 2005in Bowles, Gintis, & Osborne Groves, 2005Nash, 2003;McIntosh & Munk, 2013). One of the results emerging from the debate between the psychologist Piaget and the linguist Chomsky was that they attributed both cultural and structural-biological dimensions to ability and concluded that ability was related to both experience and a generative IQ (see, e.g., Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980).…”