Prof. Dr. Jan Skopekt vom Trinity College Dublin [Link zur Website] kommt für eine LIfBi Lecture in die Wilhelmspost.

Abstract: Research in sociology of education highlights the ambiguous role schools may play in shaping equality of opportunity. On one hand, critical perspectives view schools as institutions of social reproduction that generate inequality by allocating students to unequal learning environments. Positive accounts of schooling, on the other hand, view schools as a force of equalization as schools create more standardized and equal learning opportunities than non-school environments. After introducing theories of schooling, the lecture will discuss common research designs that aim to empirically identify the causal effect schools have on inequality in student learning. Among those, the lecture will highlight the differential exposure approach (DEA), a more recent and versatile causal framework to identify schooling effects in large scale assessment studies. Fresh evidence on the causal effects of schooling on social and ethnic gaps in learning in Germany and United states will be presented. An outlook on future research opportunities will be given at the end of the talk.