Effects Of Socioeconomic Composition Research Articles

The substantiveness of school socioeconomic compositional effects: a response to Marks

The substantiveness of school socioeconomic compositional effects: a response to Marks

The substantiveness of socioeconomic school compositional effects in Australia: measurement error and the relationship with academic composition

This study examines the effect of school socioeconomic composition on student achievement growth in Australian schooling, and its relationship with academic composition utilising the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) dataset. Previous research has found that school composition predicts a range of schooling outcomes. A critique of school compositional research has been that measurement error may have biased findings of compositional effects. Prior studies have found that socioeconomic compositional effect sizes are small when models include academic composition. The relationship between socioeconomic and academic compositions has yet to be fully determined. Multi-level regressions and structural equation models were compared to estimate the degree of bias in socioeconomic compositional effects due to measurement error. Multi-level path models were used to test if academic composition mediated the relationship between socioeconomic composition and achievement growth. The results showed that measurement error did not bias compositional effects in the dataset, and academic composition mediates the relationship between socioeconomic composition and achievement growth. We argue that school value-add research should include academic composition to account for contextual effects. The socioeconomic compositional effect is of practical significance to policy makers and educational researchers due to its relative size compared to average student achievement growth. Potential reforms include ensuring public subsidies to private schools in Australia do not increase school segregation and the amelioration of the effects of residential segregation through school funding reforms.

Children’s executive function development and school socio-economic and racial/ethnic composition

The links between children’s literacy and mathematics development and school socio-economic and racial/ethnic composition are well documented. This work, however, has generally ignored the potential effects of school demographic characteristics on children’s executive function skills. Using data from ECLS-K: 2011 and piece-wise linear growth-curve models within a three-level hierarchical framework, we explore the associations between children’s executive function development and the socio-economic and racial/ethnic compositions of their schools in kindergarten through second grade. We find somewhat mixed results, with some evidence of school socio-economic compositional effects, particularly for initially lower-skilled children in kindergarten, but stronger indications that school racial/ethnic enrollments influence executive function development across age and skill levels.

The effects of classroom socioeconomic composition on student’s civic knowledge in Chile

In Chile, the influence of the socioeconomic make-up of classrooms on achievement has been extensively studied in mathematics and language, but less in currently important non-traditional subjects such as civic knowledge. This paper analyses the effects of the socioeconomic composition of classrooms on students’ civic knowledge achievement in Chile, using the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2009 and a multilevel methodology. This research finds positive influences of higher socioeconomic intakes of 36% of one standard deviation in test scores. These results suggest that in the socioeconomically segregated Chilean education system, these effects would contribute to widening the civic knowledge attainment gap between pupils attending affluent and less affluent schools. In addition, this research finds that, on average, students with a higher individual socioeconomic status are more sensitive to these influences and that socioeconomic composition effects are more acute in the private-voucher sector than in the public sector.

Socioeconomic and language minority classroom composition and individual reading achievement: The mediating role of instructional quality

In this study, we investigated effects of socioeconomic and language minority classroom composition on students' reading achievement and explored the mediating role of central features of instructional quality, namely focus on language, student-oriented climate, and structured classroom management. Analyses were based on data collected from 352 German ninth-grade classrooms across two measurement points (t1, t2) in a multilevel framework. We found socioeconomic composition to be related to individual reading achievement at t2 after accounting for the corresponding baseline assessment at t1. However, the proportion of German language learners had no additional effect on reading achievement. Our results also suggest that the effect of the socioeconomic composition on achievement may be mediated partially by the teacher's focus on language during instruction. We conclude that more attention has to be paid to providing equal opportunities to all students in language classes.

School socioeconomic compositional effect on shadow education participation: evidence from Japan

While shadow education, organized learning activities outside formal school, has grown greatly around the world, the relationship between formal schooling and shadow education has not been well investigated. This study is therefore intended to empirically test whether formal education’s structure (i.e. tracking) affects students’ shadow education participation by utilizing a nationally representative dataset consisting of 10th-grade students in Japan. Results of multilevel logistic regression analyses show school socioeconomic compositional and cross-level interaction effects on shadow education participation: students in high-socioeconomic status (SES) schools are more likely to seek shadow education lessons than those in schools of lower SES; and higher SES students tend to take shadow education lessons, especially when in high-SES schools. Additionally, the study finds that the school composition effect becomes relatively weak when extra lessons are free of charge, highlighting the importance of family economic capital to obtain additional learning opportunities.