Ethnic differences in attainment seem to be a consistent feature of medical education in the UK, being present across medical schools, exam types, and undergraduate and postgraduate assessments, and have persisted for at least the past three decades.
Although not possible to quantify, it is plausible that differences in attainment are related to the resources applied in different regions.
Our summary of adjusted results enables us to begin to look at some of the possible confounders and showed that differences in attainment are unlikely to be more prominent in men or women.
"Our research continues to show very large differences in attainment between children born at the start and end of the academic year, which affects the post-compulsory education options open to them," said Claire Crawford, programme director of the IFS and one of the report's authors.
And since many are oversubscribed and use lotteries to assign places, they create a natural experiment where any differences in attainment can be interpreted causally.
9 51 52 The separate analysis of machine marked written assessments and practical assessments allowed us to investigate possible effects of examiner bias and verbal communication skills on ethnic differences in attainment.
Laws was also asked about the controversial views of Prof Robert Plomin, who has claimed that half the differences in attainment between pupils had genetic causes.
He was writing in a country where education was tuition-free and one still found enormous class differences in attainment and performance.' Similarly, when "Distinction," Mr. Bourdieu's book on taste, appeared in English in 1984, the reaction was lukewarm.
Making the best teachers work with the worst pupils could go a long way toward minimising the yawning differences in attainment within a school system, the authors contend.At the very least, that change would be lucrative for the pupils who benefit from it, according to the researchers' second paper.
Our research question was "can a brief self-affirmation task reduce ethnic differences in attainment in medical school examinations?".
