What School Factors are Associated with the Success of Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Students? An Empirical Investigation Using PISA Data

Tommaso Agasisti,Sergio Longobardi,Francesco Avvisati,Francesca Borgonovi

doi:10.1007/s11205-021-02668-w

Abstract

Many school-level policies, such as school funding formulae and teacher allocation mechanisms, aim at reducing the influence of students’ low socio-economic condition on academic achievement. Benchmarks and indicators based on large-scale international assessments can be used to measure academic success and identify if and when disadvantaged students are successful. We build on such work and develop a new method for identifying a cross-country comparable metric of the academic success of socio-economically disadvantaged students using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We estimate the prevalence of successful disadvantaged students in 56 countries, as well as changes over time between 2006 and 2015. In addition, we focus on the PISA 2015 edition and explore school factors associated with the probability that disadvantaged students will be successful academically in a subsample of 18 countries. Findings reveal that successful disadvantaged students attend schools with a better disciplinary climate and that provide additional time for instruction in key subjects.

Highlights

Since the publication of the Coleman Report more than 50 years ago (Coleman et al, 1966), sociologists and economists of education have documented a strong correlation between measures of students’ achievement and their families’ socio-economic and cultural background (Haveman & Wolfe, 1995)
We use data from multiple editions of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to analyse the proportion of disadvantaged students who achieve good levels of academic achievement across countries, and we investigate, for a subset of countries, school-level characteristics that are most related to their academic success
The term “resilience” was originally used in physics and engineering to characterise the ability of materials to resume their original shape or condition after being subjected to a shock (Treloar, 1975), and in medicine to describe the ability of patients to recover after traumatic events, such as surgery or accidents (Boyden & Mann, 2005)

Summary

Introduction

Since the publication of the Coleman Report more than 50 years ago (Coleman et al, 1966), sociologists and economists of education have documented a strong correlation between measures of students’ achievement and their families’ socio-economic and cultural background (Haveman & Wolfe, 1995) Such a relationship holds—with higher or lower intensity—in virtually all contexts analysed in empirical studies—see Sirin (2005) for a discussion and review of the empirical evidence. Analyses of data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reveal large differences among countries in the relationship between indicators of socio-economic background and achievement (Avvisati, 2020; Montt, 2010; Pokropek et al, 2015). The universal presence of an association but the difference in strength across contexts motivate our interest in understanding the factors (individual and school-related) that can moderate the impact of socioeconomic disadvantage on educational success

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