The Educational Disadvantage Toolkit

August 9, 2026

Anyone who has tried to compare student data collected in different countries has hit the same wall. Most surveys measure student background, and no two measure it the same way. First-generation status, minority status, even something as apparently simple as what language a student speaks at home all get asked differently from one survey to the next, and pooling the results is harder than it should be. For a network built on running the same study in many places at once, this is not an abstract problem.

Jana Sadeh, Malte Ring and Doug McKee have built something to fix it. The Educational Disadvantage Toolkit is a short, carefully worded set of questions covering the dimensions that matter most, from caregiver education and language through work and care responsibilities, financial concerns, and physical and mental health. It came out of a structured review and international validation.

The idea is a common baseline rather than a straitjacket. Ask the toolkit questions as they are written, add whatever context-specific items your own study needs, and your data still lines up with everybody else’s. We are folding these questions into EENE surveys for exactly that reason.

A PDF of the questions and a paper describing the toolkit are on the Shared Resources page now, and ready-to-use Qualtrics and Microsoft Forms versions are available from Jana Sadeh on request.