Global Data Set on Education Quality (1965-2015)

This paper presents the largest globally comparable panel database of education quality. The database includes 163 countries and regions over 1965-2015. The globally comparable achievement outcomes were constructed by linking standardized, psychometrically-robust international and regional achievement tests. The paper contributes to the literature in the following ways:

1. it is the largest and most current globally comparable data set, covering more than 90 percent of the global population;
2. the data set includes 100 developing areas and the most developing countries included in such a data set to date – the countries that have the most to gain from the potential benefits of a high-quality education;
3. the data set contains credible measures of globally comparable achievement distributions as well as mean scores;
4. the data set uses multiple methods to link assessments, including mean and percentile linking methods, thus enhancing the robustness of the data set;
5. the data set includes the standard errors for the estimates, enabling explicit quantification of the degree of reliability of each estimate; and
6. the data set can be disaggregated across gender, socioeconomic status, rural/urban, language, and immigration status, thus enabling greater precision and equity analysis.