Migrant Youths’ Educational Achievement

2011

We use 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data to link institutional arrangements in OECD countries to the disparity in reading, math, and science test scores for migrant and native-born students. We find that achievement gaps are larger for migrant youths who arrive at older ages and those who do not speak the test language at home. Institutional arrangements often serve to mitigate the achievement gaps of some migrant students while leaving unaffected or exacerbating those of others. For example, earlier school starting ages help migrant youths in some cases but by no means in all. Limited tracking on ability appears beneficial for migrants' relative achievement, while complete tracking and a large private school sector appear detrimental. Migrant students' achievement relative to their native-born peers suffers as educational spending and teachers' salaries increase, but improves when examination is a component of the process for evaluating teachers.

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2012

We use 2009 Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) data to link institutional arrangements in OECD countries to the disparity in reading, math, and science test scores for migrant and native-born students. We find that achievement gaps are larger for those migrant youths who arrive later and for those who do not speak the test language at home. Institutional arrangements often serve to mitigate the achievement gaps of some migrant students while leaving unaffected or exacerbating those of others. For example, earlier school starting ages help migrant youths in some cases, but by no means in all. Limited tracking on ability appears beneficial for migrants' relative achievement, while complete tracking and a large private school sector appear detrimental. Migrant students' achievement relative to their native-born peers suffers as educational spending and teachers' salaries increase, but is improved when examination is a component of the process for evaluating teachers.

Large-scale Assessments in Education, 2013

This paper explores the extent to which educational system features of destination and origin countries can explain differences in immigrant children's educational achievement. Using data from the 2006 PISA survey, we performed cross-classified multilevel analysis on the science performance of 9.279 15-year-old immigrant children, originating from 35 different countries, living in 16 Western countries of destination. We take into account a number of educational system characteristics of the countries of destination and origin, in order to measure the importance of differentiation, standardization, and the availability of resources. Our results show that differences in educational achievement between immigrants cannot be fully attributed to individual characteristics. Educational system characteristics of countries of destination and origin are also meaningful. At the origin level, the length of compulsory education positively influences educational performance. This is especially the case for immigrant pupils who attended education in their countries of origin. Results show that at the destination level, teacher shortage negatively affects immigrant pupil's scientific performance. Moreover, immigrant children perform less in highly stratified systems than they do in moderately differentiated or comprehensive ones. Especially immigrant children with highly educated parents perform worse in highly stratified systems.

European Educational Research Journal, 2012

The main research question of this article is concerned with the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. The authors focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores and the extent to which these effects are affected by characteristics of the school, track, or educational system in which these students are enrolled. In doing so, they examine the 'sorting' mechanisms of schools and tracks in highly stratified, moderately stratified, and comprehensive education systems. They use data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) wave. Compared with previous research in this area, the article's main contribution is in explicitly including the tracks-within-school level as a separate unit of analysis, which leads to less biased results concerning the effects of educational system characteristics. The results highlight the importance of including factors of track level and school composition in the debate surrounding educational inequality of opportunity for students in different education contexts. The findings clearly indicate that analyses of the effects of educational system characteristics are flawed if the analysis only uses a country level and a student level and ignores the tracks-within-school-level characteristics. From a policy perspective, the most important finding is that educational systems are neither uniformly 'good' nor uniformly 'bad', but they can result in different consequences for different migrant groups. Some migrant groups are better off in comprehensive systems, while others are better off in moderately stratified systems.

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.

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.

Social Science Research

The results suggest that basic associations between poverty and the outcomes of migrant children mask an underlying complexity...."

2012

Using Program for International Student Assessment [PISA] 2006 data, we examine the science performance of 9.279 15-year-old children of immigrants, originating from 35 different countries, living in 16 Western countries of destination. Whereas former research has mainly paid attention to the influence of individual-level characteristics on the educational performance of immigrants, this study’s focus is on macro-level characteristics. Using a cross-classified multilevel approach, we examine the impact of educational systems and political, economic, and religious features of both countries of origin and destination. The results show that at the destination level the degree of teacher shortage has a negative, and a longer history of migration has a positive, effect on science performance. Moreover, comprehensive educational systems have a positive influence on immigrant children’s performance, but this is only the case for higher class children. At the origin level, the compulsor...

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

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.