Early between-school tracking and gender gaps in achievement

The between-school tracking system is responsible for assigning students to academic or applied tracks based on their educational achievement. However, the time that the first between-school selection happened may have a different influence on the gender gap in achievement. This study assumes that early between-school tracking will widen the gender gap in overall achievement from primary school to secondary school. Besides, I also hypothesize that female will expand advantages in reaching achievement in secondary school by early between-school tracking, whereas early tracking makes male outperform female more in secondary school. I utilized the data from PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA, and matched the waves based on the birth cohort of respondents and the year that surveys were carried out. This sample contains 44 countries (15 countries with early tracking and 29 countries with late tracking), 22 matches, and 2699532 observations. Difference-in-differences model and meta-analysis are used in data analysis. As I expected, the results show significant gender gap changes because of early between-school tracking in reading achievements and mathematics achievement. But empirical evidence did not show significance in science achievement and overall achievement.