The Declining Relative Importance of Ability in Predicting Educational Attainment
利用英国两项纵向研究，分析过去几十年教育扩张中认知能力和家庭背景对教育成就影响的变化，发现能力的重要性下降，部分原因是高经济地位的低能力孩子教育成就提升最大。
Most countries seek to reduce inequality by encouraging educational attainment, particularly by striving for better outcomes for able individuals from poor backgrounds. We analyse whether this has been a feature of Britain’s substantial expansion of education during the past several decades. We use two unique longitudinal studies to test whether these improvements have been associated with changes in the role of cognitive ability and parental background in determining educational achievement. We find a decline in the importance of ability in explaining educational performance, in part because low ability children with high economic status experienced the largest increases in educational attainment.