School Resources and Students’ Resilience: Identifying Successful Practices for Enhancing the School Achievement of Disadvantaged Students

• In Event: “Using the World as an Educational Laboratory”: Merging Educational Effectiveness Research and International Comparative Studies

Abstract

Objective
The main objectives of this paper are: i) to identify school factors that could help socially disadvantaged students in different countries to become academically resilient, and ii) to evaluate and explain the existence of cross-country patterns in the light of countries’ educational policy context.

Theoretical Framework
It is well documented that in most countries there is a group of students who are academically successful despite their challenging backgrounds. These students are called resilient. We use concepts from the theory of Cultural Reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977) to analyze this phenomenon. Within this framework, it can be said that the academic performance of students can be at least in part explained by the amount and composition of their different types of capital (cultural, economic, social). In this work we give special attention to the concepts associated to economic capital in schools (i.e. school resources) and discuss the results in a comparative fashion according to countries’ type of welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990).

Methods
We employ specifications of hierarchical logistic regression models to identify the factors associated to a high likelihood of academic resilience. We operationalized academic resilience based upon the socially disadvantaged background and academic success. First, we used PCA to construct a SES index. Then we categorized “socially disadvantaged students” as those who score at or below the 20th percentile of the SES index across countries. Finally, we defined “academically successful” students as those who achieved a reading score at or above the 20th percentile in their country.

Data
We used data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2011. TIMSS assessed student achievement in Mathematics and Science in a target population of 4th graders in 64 education systems. TIMSS also gathered information about the contexts for learning from participating students, their teachers, and their school principals.

Results
Preliminary results suggest that: i) The proportion of resilient students varies considerably across education systems, being the systems marked with stronger welfare provisions the ones with the higher proportion of resilient students. ii) The variables used to operationalize cultural capital seem to be the most important predictors of a high likelihood of academic resilience across education systems. iii) However, in countries with weaker welfare provisions family and school economic capital (i.e. school resources) also showed to be important. Interactions among different types of capital and possible policy implications are discussed in the full paper.

Significance of the Study
This work contributes to fill a gap in the literature by using international comparative data and a well-grounded theoretical framework to analyze academic resilience. Its findings identify school resources and characteristics that could help enhancing academic achievement of socially disadvantaged students. We believe that these results can contribute to the design of public policies and programs aimed at reducing inequalities in the distribution of educational opportunities.

References
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction. In Karabel, J. and Halsey, A. H., eds, Power and Ideology in Education. Oxford: OUP.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Princeton University Press.

Author

• Andres Sandoval-Hernandez, International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement