Factores asociados a la adquisición de competencias en América Latina

Since 2000, and with a periodicity of three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has been applying the International Program for the Evaluation of Students, with the aim of evaluating their competences in the areas of reading, mathematics and science., to determine how prepared they are for their future life. This article identifies the factors that indexed on the acquisition of skills in Latin America. For this purpose, the information of the eight Latin American countries participating in Programme for International Student Assessment 2012 is employed. As the base in question containing missing data, the method nonparametric hot-deck imputation was applied. Using a hierarchical linear model with random predictor, on two levels, to analyze the PISA 2012 for the Latin American countries results we found that the main determinants of school performance are gender, condition of not repeater and quality of school materials. In addition, it was determined that the variability in skills acquisition is explained, in a smaller proportion, by the heterogeneity in the characteristics of the students. Finally, it was estimated that private schools have a better performance than public ones, where Brazil, Costa Rica and Uruguay were the countries with the highest educational inequality.