Constellations of In- and Out-of-School Resources Influencing Students’ Educational Aspirations in New Middle Schools From a Longitudinal Perspective

• In Event: Roundtable Session 28
  In Roundtable Session: Success Stories in Transitions

Abstract

The “New Middle School”, a new form of comprehensive school, was introduced in Austria in 2009. The overall goal of the new school form is to limit marginalizing processes and to improve transitions and trajectories within an inclusive school setting. Especially the reform model of the lower Austrian Government aims to broaden the educational base of all pupils and to broaden the educational expectations of students within the inclusive school setting. This raises the question as to how students’ educational aspirations develop over time and allows for reflection on the resources upon which students base their educational aspiration in new middle schools of lower Austria.
Bourdieu assumes that people have different types of capital, namely economic, cultural and social capital, and that the specific interplay of these shapes the families´ aspirations and has an impact on their decisions (Bourdieu, 1983; 1992). Taking this further, Du Bois-Reymond (2000) pointed out that peer capital serves as a resource in knowledge-based societies. Archer describes how the interplay of "family habitus" and "family capital" influences students’ aspirations (Archer et al., 2012). Within this framework, the evaluative study NOESIS focuses on the possibilities open to students attending the new school form. Hence in this this paper the individual perceptions on the educational aspiration of students attending a new middle school in Lower Austria is analyzed.
A longitudinal approach is chosen in which students´ educational aspirations are followed from the first years of lower secondary school (5th grade), which serves as a baseline, through to the middle of compulsory school (7th grade). This offers the opportunity to learn more about students´ educational aspirations over the long term and to analyze how these are shaped by in- and out-of-school resources. With reference to the results of the Hausman-Test, the results of the General-Slope Model were taken to depict the outcomes of the longitudinal analyses (Rabe-Hesketh & Skrondal, 2012).
Descriptive analyses show that students´ educational aspirations are high (44 %) and throughout the years even more students tend to finish upper-level (63 %; 66 %) and that more than the half of students seems to be rather confident about reaching their educational aspirations. The longitudinal analysis shows that student motivation, self-esteem in the core subjects German and Mathematics, as well grades in Mathematics, have an impact on students´ educational aspirations. Scales of the out-of-school resources reveal that students´ educational aspirations rise over time the higher the socioeconomic status of the family, as well as with the amount of the families’ cultural capital. What also matters from a longitudinal perspective is the support of private tutoring.
It seems that at this stage of the implementation of a new school model concentrating on learning processes in school the educational aspirations of students are influenced by their family backgrounds, e.g. economic capital, private tutoring or cultural capital. Focusing on the within-school aspects the influence of mathematics (measured in grades) and self-esteem has an impact. The current longitudinal results suggest that students have high aspirations and that in general these increases.

Author

• Michaela Kilian, University of Vienna