We reassess the relation between students’ socioeconomic status (SES) and their achievement by treating SES as multidimensional instead of unidimensional. We use data from almost 600,000 students in 77 countries participating in the 2018 PISA assessment of student achievement in math, science, and reading. The composite measure of SES that PISA uses can be broken down into six component variables that we here use as simultaneous predictors of achievement. This analysis yields several new insights. First, in the typical society, two predictors (books at home and parents’ highest occupational status) clearly outperform the rest. Second, a new composite measure based only on these two components often reveals substantially larger achievement gaps than those reported by PISA. Third, the analysis revealed remarkable differences between societies in the relation between achievement and wealth possessions. In most societies, the independent effect of wealth possessions on student achievement was zero or even slightly negative—but in the least developed societies it was strongly positive. These findings have implications for how SES achievement gaps should be measured and interpreted.
Research‐practice partnerships (RPPs) have drawn a great deal of attention as promising structures for bringing educational research and practice closer together. However, promising as RPPs may be, challenges still exist and there have been calls for studies investigating how research can be used within RPPs, and how to include practitioners more in the generation of research evidence. We address these calls by conducting a systematic review of the research literature on RPPs. Our review of 57 articles shows that research is used in various ways to inform both the methods and content for facilitating school improvement in RPPs. For instance, research on effective PD can be directly applied to a Professional Development (PD) programme to inform the methods of the intervention, or research findings can be used as the content of an intervention to facilitate teacher learning. Moreover, the results suggest that the type of research used to inform RPPs affects the kinds of opportunities for research use that are presented to practitioners; ranging from applying research directly to practice (instrumental use), to using research to extend understanding (conceptual use), or using research methods and methodologies in order to increase practitioners’ capacity for improving education (process use). Based on the results, we argue that the presented opportunities for research use in interventions strongly affect teachers’ opportunities to participate in the generation of research evidence and thereby achieve a more democratised evidence system.
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