A More Equitable Approach to Student Socioeconomic Status Measurement

Efforts to promote equity and ensure opportunity for all learners in the United States requires a deeper understanding of how the supports provided to students outside of school influence learning and how schools can compensate for lack of such supports among some students. The relationship between students’ academic success and the resources available to them in their homes and communities has long been a topic of interest to education policymakers and researchers.


Researchers often use socioeconomic status (SES) to examine influences on student learning. Measures of SES typically include information about student and family background. Although SES can be measured in a variety of ways, researchers have largely settled on three components as the basis for student SES measurement: parental education, parental occupation, and family income. This student SES information is often collected as part of the survey questionnaires that are paired with large-scale assessments (LSAs), providing context for student achievement.
Despite the long-standing acceptance of these traditional survey questions, they reflect outdated assumptions about students’ caregivers and living arrangements. Although the parent survey questions provide useful and valid SES information about students living together with both their biological mother and father, they are not well-suited for students with other kinds of families. It is relatively common for grandparents, stepparents, aunts, uncles, and other adults to provide the financial and emotional support traditionally assumed to come solely from one mother and one father. Some students live in more than one household and have four or more different adults in their lives that act as their caregivers. To properly measure student SES in the ever-changing social landscape, alternative measures are needed to ensure an equitable and inclusive survey questionnaire experience for all students.
In working toward that goal, we are excited to share Beyond Nuclear Families: Development of Inclusive Student Socioeconomic Status Survey Questions. In this report, we describe a two-part study in which we developed and tested a new set of survey questions for measuring household composition, caregiver education, and caregiver employment while accounting for the diversity of students’ housing arrangements and family structures. The ETS study was conducted in support of a U.S.-based assessment measuring student achievement.
Study One:
We interviewed students in grades 4, 8, and 12 with nontraditional families to better understand how these students think about their families and caregivers. The sample included students from single-parent households, households with adults other than parents, extended family households, and multiple household arrangements. Students in all three grades demonstrated that they understood the concept of caregivers and could give examples of typical caregiver behavior such as providing emotional support or clothing and shelter. The students also demonstrated that they understood whether they lived in one or more places. Read More

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