Abstract
The study of the territorial difference in educational achievement is a widely debated topic, in particular in Italy for the presence of the well-known strong regional disparities. National and international large scale assessments confirmed that the main characteristic of the Italian school system is the geographical cleavage between North and South. Policymakers have pressing needs to find solutions to reduce geographical disparities. In this study, we investigate the spatial disparities of academic achievement from a new perspective, assuming that the relationship between academic achievement and predictors varies across Italy. Our aim is to examine the extent of the spatial disparities in the relationship between academic achievement and some school-level factors related to inequalities in educational outcomes, moving beyond the regional administrative confines, in order to identify new spatial patterns. We exploited the reading standardized tests administered by INVALSI in 2018–2019 focusing on the 8th-grade students. Crucial to our contribution is the use of the geographically weighted regression and the k-mean clustering, which allows studying the spatial variability of the impact of the school-level factors on academic achievement and to gather schools in new spatial clusters. The findings of this paper demonstrate the necessity to design a more specific education policy and support the identification of the main critical factors for different geographical areas.
Highlights
A well-educated and well-trained population is crucial for the social and economic well-being of a country
We aim to identify in which schools/geographical areas it is necessary planning an intervention to flatten the effects of some factors associated in the literature with the inequality in education in order to guarantee greater equality
We checked the presence of multicollinearity between the predictors using the variance inflation factor (VIF), that measure how much the variance of the estimated regression coefficient is inflated by its correlation with the other predictors
Summary
A well-educated and well-trained population is crucial for the social and economic well-being of a country. Sacco and Falzetti Large-scale Assess Educ (2021) 9:12 status and where one lives To reach this goal, monitoring the educational outcome and understanding the factors behind students’ and schools’ results have become paramount, accentuating the importance assumed by the large-scale assessments, able to guarantee comparable and reliable data on students’ achievement. A topic of great interest in educational research in order to deal with inequality in the school system is understanding the factors that influence the learning outcomes. Understanding the factors that influence student achievement could help educators and policymakers in setting up a support system to allow all students to perform better and to develop equality in the educational system. We aim to identify in which schools/geographical areas it is necessary planning an intervention to flatten the effects of some factors associated in the literature with the inequality in education in order to guarantee greater equality. We analysed the effect of the school size on the school mean performance to examine if the geographical position of the school influenced the role of school size on the improvement of the achievements
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