Gary N. Marks

Gary Marks is a researcher at the Australian Catholic University. He is has published extensively on many aspects of education, the school to work transition, social inequality and social stratification. He was involved in the early rounds of the OECD’s PISA study and has worked on school, youth and household longitudinal studies. He has recently published several journal articles on student and school differences in the Australian National Assessments of Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). His 2014 book Education, Social Background and Cognitive Ability: The Decline of Social (Routledge, NY Oxen.) is about cross-national and over-time changes in educational and subsequent labour market inequalities in Western countries. The book demonstrates that socioeconomic inequalities in education are generally weak and declining and cognitive ability is far more important, and the importance of cognitive ability is largely independent of socioeconomic factors .