Predictive Validity of Tracking Decisions: Application of a New Validation Criterion

Abstract

Although tracking decisions are primarily based on students’ achievements, distributions of academic competences in secondary school strongly overlap between school tracks. However, the correctness of tracking decisions usually is based on whether or not a student has kept the track she or he was initially assigned to. To overcome the neglect of misclassified students, we propose an alternative validation criterion for tracking decisions. We applied this criterion to a sample of N = ;2, ;300 Luxembourgish 9th graders in order to identify misclassifications due to tracking decisions. In Luxembourg, students in secondary school attend either an academic track or a vocational track. Students’ scores of academic achievement tests were obtained at the beginning of 9th grade. The test-score distributions, separated by tracks, overlapped to a large degree. Based on the distributions’ intersection, we determined two competence levels. With respect to their individual scores, we assigned each student to one of these levels. It turned out that about 21 % of the students attended a track that did not match their competence level. Whereas the agreement between tracking decisions and actual tracks in 9th grade was fairly high (κ = 0. 93), the agreement between tracking decisions and competence levels was only moderate (κ = 0. 56).