Chapter 3. Primary School Skill Development: from First to Sixth Grade suitable for comparable skill assessment at every stage in primary education, since the nature of the tests remains consistent across grades. Von Hippel and Hamrock (2019) show that such consistency is important: many observed patterns of achievements gaps in other studies are significantly influenced by measurement artifacts. Two key artifacts are scaling and changes in test forms. Scaling methods affect how ability gaps appear to grow over time. Changes in test forms can distort estimates as they make it difficult to determine whether score divergences reflect true ability changes or measurement inconsistencies. Our data do not suffer from both measurement artifacts. Another strength of our data is that we are able to compare a variety of skills across the grades of primary education within the same student sample. Second, we examine the development of achievement gaps during an essential period of skill development applying a novel methodology. This methodology enables us to estimate the extent to which sixthgrade achievement gaps are formed by disparities at an earlier stage. We build on previous work using this methodology (e.g., Bradbury et al., 2015; Passaretta & Skopek, 2018a; Passaretta et al., 2022; Skopek & Passaretta, 2018; Van Huizen, 2018), by applying it to examine the trajectories of achievement differences between SES, sex, and migration background. Furthermore, studies using our methodology focus on language skills, or have used a compositive measure for quantitative skills. Our work instead investigates more concrete skills, namely reading comprehension, spelling and math skills. Last, we extend the literature by controlling for parental education and school fixed effects in our analyses, which are two important com44
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