Presentation Schedule
Inequality of Opportunity Through Effort in Education: An Application of Machine-learning to PISA Data (93060)
Session Chair: Masica Jordan Alston
Thursday, 12 June 2025 14:40
Session: Session 3
Room: Room 114 (1F)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
Policymakers commonly aim at equalizing opportunity and not outcome. This is because many hold that inequalities due to different levels of effort are acceptable, while those due to uncontrollable circumstances (e.g., race, sex, family-background) are objectionable (Mijs, 2021). However, sociological studies reveal that how hard people work is partly conditioned by such circumstances (Radl et al., 2024) – an important caveat often overlooked in meritocratic societies (Andre, 2024). Then, as Roemer (1998) argued, inequality of opportunity (IOp) should be defined as inequality due to the effects of circumstances, including their indirect effects through effort.
This paper estimates the extent of IOp in educational attainment, which, importantly, includes the portion of it that manifests through effort. I operationalize Roemer’s (1998) model of IOp by applying the following two methods to the data from OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). First, I use a recently developed measure of students’ effort, which quantifies their performance decline during the assessment (Palacios-Abad, 2021). This makes this study the first to bring insights from the psychosocial studies of effort into IOp estimation. Second, I adopt a machine-learning approach called Model-based Recursive Partitioning (Brunori et al., 2022). This makes it the first to conduct a machine-learning estimation of IOp for education.
The study targets Japan and other selected OECD countries. A comparatively high-level of IOp in educational attainment in 2006 and 2012, and an increase between these two periods are found in Japan. Finally, I discuss potential reasons for these results from a comparative policy perspective.
Authors:
Yohei Yoshizawa, King's College London, United Kingdom
About the Presenter(s)
Yohei Yoshizawa is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Economy of King's College London.
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