Socioeconomic Status as a Multidimensional Predictor of Student Achievement in 77 Societies

Kimmo Eriksson,Ola Helenius,Jannika Lindvall,Andreas Ryve

doi:10.3389/feduc.2021.731634

Kimmo Eriksson, Ola Helenius + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.731634

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Abstract

We reassess the relation between students’ socioeconomic status (SES) and their achievement by treating SES as multidimensional instead of unidimensional. We use data from almost 600,000 students in 77 countries participating in the 2018 PISA assessment of student achievement in math, science, and reading. The composite measure of SES that PISA uses can be broken down into six component variables that we here use as simultaneous predictors of achievement. This analysis yields several new insights. First, in the typical society, two predictors (books at home and parents’ highest occupational status) clearly outperform the rest. Second, a new composite measure based only on these two components often reveals substantially larger achievement gaps than those reported by PISA. Third, the analysis revealed remarkable differences between societies in the relation between achievement and wealth possessions. In most societies, the independent effect of wealth possessions on student achievement was zero or even slightly negative—but in the least developed societies it was strongly positive. These findings have implications for how SES achievement gaps should be measured and interpreted.

Highlights

For more than half a century, socioeconomic status (SES) has been recognized as a major influence on student achievement (White, 1982; Coleman et al, 1966; Sirin, 2005; Harwell et al, 2017)
The current study aims at empirically demonstrating these advantages using data from the international large-scale assessment PISA
The Two-Item Index Explains More Variance in Achievement In Table 3 we report the proportion of variance in student achievement explained by the ESCS index and the two-item SES index, respectively

Summary

Introduction

For more than half a century, socioeconomic status (SES) has been recognized as a major influence on student achievement (White, 1982; Coleman et al, 1966; Sirin, 2005; Harwell et al, 2017) In this body of research, SES is typically treated as a unidimensional predictor that can be operationalized in many different ways, such as by parents’ educational attainment, parents’ occupations, or the family’s economic resources, or by a composite of these factors (Cowan et al, 2012). The dominant perspective in this research area is that different socioeconomic factors are not important in their own right Key socioeconomic factors such as parents’ income and occupations are treated merely as different indicators of the presumed unidimensional hierarchical social structure that influences the achievement of students. The only relevant comparison between different socioeconomic is which of them serves best as an indicator of SES and the literature offers a range of views on this issue

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