PISA mathematics and reading performance differences of mainstream European and Turkish immigrant students (original) (raw)
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A quantitative synthesis of the immigrant achievement gap across OECD countries
Large-scale Assessments in Education, 2014
Background: While existing evidence strongly suggests that immigrant students underperform relative to their native counterparts on measures of mathematics, science, and reading, country-level analyses assessing the homogeneity of the immigrant achievement gap across different factors have not been systematically conducted. Beyond finding a statistically significant average achievement gap, existing findings show considerable variation. The goal of this quantitative synthesis was to analyze effect sizes which compared immigrants to natives on international mathematics, reading, and science examinations. Methods: We used data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). We investigated whether the achievement gap is larger in some content areas than others (among mathematics, science, and reading), across the different types of tests (PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS), across academic grades and age, and whether it has changed across time. Standardized mean differences between immigrant and native students were obtained using data from 2000 to 2009 for current Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Results: Statistically significant weighted mean effect sizes favored native test takers in mathematics d à math ¼ 0:38 à reading ¼ 0:38 à science ¼ 0:43 À Á. Effects of moderators differed across content areas. Conclusions: Our analyses have the potential to contribute to the literature about how variation in the immigrant achievement gap relates to different national-level factors.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018
This paper documents the change in educational achievement differences between native and foreign background students between the ages of 10 and 15, as they progress from primary to secondary education. We examine three cohorts of students in a number of Western European and traditional English-speaking immigration countries using combinations of PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA survey data. While the performance of students with mixed parents is not markedly different from native students', foreign background children-both first-and second-generation-exhibit a large achievement gap at age 10 in continental Europe, even when accounting for observable differences in socioeconomic characteristics. The gap tends to narrow down by age 15 in reading, but no catching up is observed in mathematics. By contrast, we do not find significant differences between the academic achievements of immigrant children and their native-born peers in traditional immigration countries.
2012
Immigration is a rapidly-growing global phenomenon. Although many countries devote significant resources to investigate the outcomes of adult immigrants, both governments and researchers have given much less attention to the outcomes of younger immigrants. With this study, I aim to increase our understanding of immigrant student achievement, first through a synthesis of the existing evidence in the form of an extensive literature review, and second, through a quantitative analysis of the so-called 'immigrant achievement gap'. I examine the gap for fourth graders utilizing two cross-national assessments, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) via a cross-sectional multilevel analysis with students nested within schools nested within countries. First, I ask whether or not a gap exists for fourth graders as it has been largely found for older students. Second, I assess whether or not existing literature provides a good guide to explain variability in the gap. Third, I delve deeper into the gap by examining subgroups of students in order to better understand the achievement of young immigrant students. Finally, I highlight cross-national trends that emerge from the findings, as previous literature has done. I find evidence of an immigrant achievement gap for both mathematics and reading, and that existing literature provides a good skeleton by which to examine the gap. Contrary to some of the existing literature, I find that the gap is larger in mathematics than in reading. Next, I find that student characteristics are strongly associated with student scores in both mathematics and reading. Findings corroborate research based on adolescent populations which suggests that, in general, students who are native, with native parents, who speak the language of testing, have better educated parents, and are of higher socioeconomic status, outperform their counterparts on these standardized academic assessments. Further, I find that the immigrant achievement gap is smaller or non-existent between the highest-achieving immigrant and native students, that there is no gender gap between immigrant boys and girls, that 2 nd generation immigrants outperform 1 st generation immigrants, and that students who immigrated between the ages of 1-5 outperform their younger and older counterparts in mathematics, suggesting some evidence for the 'vulnerable age hypothesis'. I also find evidence which suggests that immigrant students attend lower quality schools, that the immigrant achievement gap is largest between the most xii advantaged immigrant and native students, and that there is no difference in scores among immigrant students when the gap is analyzed by the language students speak at home. Concerning the multilevel analyses, I find few school-and country-level variables predict the immigrant achievement gap significantly. Other than peer effects (including percent economically disadvantaged and percent non-native-speaking students in schools), no school variables predicted either outcome. Corroborating extant evidence, findings suggest that attending high-achieving schools predicts both outcomes positively and significantly. Concerning the country-level, results indicate that countries with exclusionary policies, nontraditional settlement countries, and countries that attract low-skilled immigrants tend to have larger immigrant achievement gaps. However, only exclusionary/inclusionary policy as a variable was significantly predictive of the outcome and only for the mathematics model. Gross Domestic Product was significant in both models although the coefficient in both instances was zero. This study contributes to the current understanding of young immigrant students' achievement by providing a synthesis of the extant literature as well as by comparing their mathematics and reading outcomes to those of their native counterparts. Although the variables utilized in this study are not all-encompassing of the extensive factors that have an effect on immigrant student achievement, they do provide a well-defined picture of what is associated with mathematics and reading outcomes. This study illuminates the current understanding of a number of dimensions for young immigrants-incoming resources, race/ethnicity, gender, student attitudes, and host culture variables (e.g., institutional-and school-related variations). It corroborates many of the findings from literature based on adolescent populations, suggesting cross-national trends that span a wide age range. However, dissimilar results also suggest that fourth-grade immigrants' academic success is associated with influences that are different than those of adolescent immigrants on several dimensions. Many limitations of this study spur from the focused definition of who is an immigrant, which is only based on country of birth, and as such limits the generalizability of the conclusions. Further, the use of secondary data limits the range of variables that can be tested in the model and therefore excludes many factors that may be considered essential to include in statistical models predicting student achievement.
The main research question of this paper is the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school-composition and track-level on the educational achievement of 15-years-old students. We specifically focus on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores and to what extent these effects are affected by characteristics of the school, track or educational system these students are in. In doing so, we examine the 'sorting' mechanisms of schools and tracks in highly stratified, moderately stratified and comprehensive education systems. We use data from the 2006 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) wave. Compared to previous research in this area the main contribution of this paper is that we explicitly include track-level and school-level as separate units of analyses, which leads to less biased results of the effects of characteristics of the educational system. The results highlight the importance of including track-level and school-level factors in the debate of educational inequality of opportunity for students in different education contexts. The findings clearly indicate that the effects of educational system characteristics are flawed if the analysis uses only a country and a student level and ignores the track-and school-level characteristics. Moreover the inclusion of the track-level is necessary to avoid overestimation of the school-composition effect, especially in stratified educational systems. From a policy perspective, the most important finding is that educational system are not uniformly 'good' or 'bad', but they have different consequences for different groups. Some groups are better off in comprehensive systems, while other groups are better off in moderately or highly stratified systems.
Immigration and Academic Achievement: The Effects of Socio Cultural and Demographic Factors
Academic engagement during the high school years, a period in which young people go through tremendous change, is one of the key predictors of success for college entrance and later developmental periods. This study aims to evaluate the effect of immigration on the academic achievement of high school students. Participants were 1112 students (545 male, 567 female) attending high schools from four provinces in Istanbul that have the highest rates of immigration (Zeytinburnu, Gaziosmanpaşa, Büyükçekmece and Esenyurt Regions). The sample was drawn from students in all four years of High School. This study provides a snapshot of migrant students' academic achievement profiles as well as the demographic determinants that might have an influence on their performance such as gender, number of siblings, generation, working status and selected majors variables. Results demonstrated that third generation have higher English score but lower Turkish language score than the first generation, gender plays a significant role on English and Turkish Language score but not on Math score.
Immigrant students and educational systems. Cross-country evidence from PISA 2006
2012
Using data from PISA 2006 on 29 countries, this paper analyses immigrant school gaps (difference in scores between immigrants and natives) and focuses on tracking and comprehensive educational systems. Results show that the wider negative gaps are present where tracking is sharp and less frequently in countries with comprehensive schooling. In both cases, negative gaps are concentrated in continental Western Europe, where they are also often related to immigrants and natives attending different schools, or are significant within schools
Educational performance of native and immigrant children from various countries of origin
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2008
Mostly due to the lack of suitable data, cross-national research on the integration of migrant pupils is still scarce. We aim to fill this gap by addressing the question of the extent to which native and first-and second-generation migrants from various regions of origin, living in thirteen different countries of destination, differ in their scholastic ability. Using the PISA 2003 data, we focus primarily on the impact of origin and destination effects on the scholastic achievement of migrants.
European Sociological Review, 2015
Prior research has identified a large number of factors that explain differences in scholastic achievement. However, analyses of the educational performance of students from immigrant families and possible changes in these performances over time remain quite scarce. The present article addresses this shortcoming by means of a multilevel analysis of 24 Western countries based on PISA data from 2000 to 2012. Since the relevance of individual explanatory factors and school characteristics has been repeatedly shown, we focus on structural effects at the level of national policies. Our results show that the disparities in educational success between native and immigrant youth declined between 2000 and 2012 in several countries under study, especially in Central Europe. Nevertheless, there still are marked and relatively stable differences between various types of immigrant societies (e.g. traditional immigration countries like Canada vs. Continental European Countries like Germany). Analysing macro-level factors we observe stability as well as change: On the one hand, the positive effect of the quality of the educational system for immigrant students' educational achievement remains stable. On the other hand, negative effects of the stratification of the educational system diminished, while educational expenditures gained influence over the last decade.