Students’ socioeconomic background and civic knowledge in association with student’s civic participation in school in Slovenia, Croatia and Italy

• In Event: Poster Session 6
  In Poster Session: Students’ socioeconomic background and civic knowledge in association with student’s civic participation in school in Slovenia, Croatia and Italy

Proposal

“Family SES has been recognized as an important determinant of children’s educational opportunities and outcomes”. (Baker, Goesling & Letendre, 2002; Heckman, 2006; Sirin, 2005; Smith-Woolley et al., 2018 in von Stumm, Cave & Wakeling, 2022: 1). Various studies show the association of socioeconomic status (SES) with lower academic achievement of students, and also discovering that SES has a strong influence on participation and involvement in science (Shonkoff in Garner, 2012), (Hochschild, 2003), (Gorard in Huat See, 2009). Researching those aspects is important for the educational environment, as it is necessary to offer support within the school system also to students with a lower SES, who have reduced support at home. In addition to parents, teachers play an important role in empowering students (Bradley in Corwyn, 2002).
A secondary analysis of International Study of Civic and Citizenship Education (ICCS) 2016 will be performed. The ICCS study “investigates the ways in which young people are prepared to undertake their roles as citizens”. Eighth grade students from 24 educational systems were included in the study (Schulz et al., 2018).
The study is interested in the following research questions:
RQ1: How is students’ civic participation in school associated with students’ socioeconomic background?
RQ2: How is students’ civic participation in school associated with students’ civic knowledge?
RQ3: To what extent students participate in different civic activities in school?
The following hypotheses have been derived from the above research questions:
H1: Students coming from background with higher socioeconomic status, tend to participate in school more, compared to students coming from background with lower socioeconomic status.
H2: Students with higher civic knowledge tend to participate more in civic activities in school.
The statistics will be done for three countries, Slovenia and two bordering countries, that also participated in ICCS study – Croatia and Italy. The descriptive statistics by category will be done for each form of civic participation of students in school individually, in addition, we will use regression analysis to test the connection between SES and civic participation of eighth graders in Slovenia. To test the hypotheses, the RALSA (R Analyzer for Large-Scale Assessments) will be used.
The study will be interested in different participation of students in civic activities in school. From several activities asked about in the student questionnaire, a scale is derived that reflects the civic participation of students in school (S_SCHPART) (Schulz et al., 2018: 280 - 281).
“The national index of students’ socioeconomic background (S_NISB) was derived from the following three indices: highest occupational status of parents (S_HISEI), highest educational level of parents (S_HISCED), and the number of books at home (S_HOMLIT)” (Schulz et al., 2018, p. 151).
The study is expecting to find some associations between the civic participation in school and students’ socioeconomic background in all three countries. It is expected that students coming from families with a higher SES, participate to a greater extent in civic activities at school than students coming from families with lower socioeconomic background.

Author

• Špela Javornik, Educational Research Institute (68705093)