The concept determines the method: A response to Hoffmann
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18222/eae.v36.12270Keywords:
Right to Education, Educational Assessment, Justice in Education, Educational InequalitiesAbstract
In this note, we respond to Rodolfo Hoffmann’s critique of the methodology we employed to evaluate differences in proficiency levels among students from different social groups in educational exams. We argue that the reviewer disregards the proposed conceptualization of distributive justice in education, as well as the aim of the study, which is to analyze quality and differences of learning among social groups defined by socioeconomic status, race, and gender. Thus, we restate our research object and contend that it requires an external reference for analyzing the distribution of student proficiency. We claim that the appropriate methodology lies in measures of divergence between two statistical distributions and justify our choice of the Kullback-Leibler divergence.
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