Cultural Context in Standardised Tests

Isabella Dobrescu, Richard Holden, Alberto Motta, Adrian Piccoli, Philip Roberts & Sarah Walker

We conducted a randomised controlled trial which shows large effects of cultural context on performance in standardised reading tests in New South Wales schools. The difference in performance on contextualised reading tests represents 33% of the rural-urban gap and 50% of the Indigenous-non-Indigenous gap.

Gonski Data Lab

An initiative of the UNSW Gonski Institute for Education and the Economics of Education Knowledge Hub @UNSWBusiness

The purpose of this interactive website is to allow users to visually explore relationships and trends between selected outside the school gate factors and the educational performance of students from individual communities. The site uses publicly available data* to compare communities, not schools, in order to better understand how whole of community, outside the school gate influences impact student performance.

Researchers and policy makers are deeply interested in understanding what influences student performance and in what context. While student performance is influenced by what happens inside schools it is also heavily influenced by what happens outside the school gate including by the community within which students live, where their community is located, and by their parents and carers.

The purpose of this tool is not to make causal inferences from these relationships and trends but rather to reframe the question about what influences student performance in different communities and to prompt further investigation of those influences.

The Economic Impact of Improving Rural & Remote Education

This report documents the differences in educational outcomes between rural, regional & remote Australia and urban Australia. The report then quantifies
the economic impact of these disparities in educational outcomes. By linking education to human capital formation—one of the key components of economic output along with physical capital—we estimate the shortfall in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) due to these differences.

If the human capital gap between urban and non-urban Australia was closed, Australia’s GDP could be increased by 3.3%, or $56 billion.

To put this in perspective, this is larger than the contribution of the entire Australian tourism industry. Put another way, one would need to quadruple the size of the Australian beef industry to achieve the same economic improvement.

Yet these are only the direct effects, on wages, of closing the human capital gap. There are important spillovers in addition to this, such as improvements in physical and mental health and enrichment of communities. We do not speculate about the size of these spillovers, but they are likely to be substantial. Furthermore, there is a multiplier effect throughout the economy from increased productivity and wages which we do not include. Thus, the size of the benefits we identify are in many ways quite conservative.

Full Report (pdf).