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Abstract
Latin American students consistently score low on international tests of cognitive skills. In the PISA 2012 results, students in seven Latin American countries had an average score of 395 in mathematics, or about 100 points lower than the average score of 497 in four Scandinavian countries. We estimate the effect of socioeconomic characteristics on student scores in Latin America and Scandinavia and find that 50 points of the difference are explained by Latin American parents’ lower average educational and socioeconomic characteristics, 25 points are explained by Latin America’s weak cultural orientation toward reading books and the remaining 25 points are explained by the lower effectiveness of Latin American educational systems in teaching cognitive skills.
Notes
1. The estimated effects for most characteristics are lower for Mexico than in the other countries. More importantly, the R2 for the models using the Mexico data is very low (.12 to .15), which is less than half the R2 for the models using data from the other countries. The different results in Mexico could have various explanations, such as a different sampling approach or a different stratification process, or errors in the data.
2. We ignore post-secondary technical training, and we combine basic and advanced secondary into one category and undergraduate, professional and graduate degrees into one post-secondary category. We combined these schooling levels after determining that more disaggregated types of schooling are not statistically significant.
3. Data provided by Joerg Baten.