Reading achievement in Canada and the United States : Findings from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment

Reading Achievement in Canada and the United States 3 4 Reading Achievement in Canada and the United States 2. The Distribution of Reading Scores in Canada and the US Table 1 displays the results for Canada and the US, alongside the norms established by the OECD member countries. [...] A socioeconomic gradient is comprised of three components: the level, which is defined as the expected score on the outcome Figure 1 Socioeconomic gradients for Canada and the measure for a person with average SES; United States the slope, which indicates the extent of inequality attributable to SES; and the strength, which refers to how much individual scores vary above and below 600 the gradient [...] For each country, the gradients are drawn from the 5th to the 95th percentiles of SES, and the small white dots on the gradient indicate the 5th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 95th percentiles of SES. [...] The most common measure of the strength of the relationship is a statistic called R-squared, which is the proportion of variance in the outcome measure explained by the predictor variable. [...] At the second level, the intercept, γ00, is the mean score for US schools, and the coefficient, γ01, is the estimate of the difference between the Canadian and US average.