An Investigation of School-Level Factors Associated With Science Performance for Minority and Majority Francophone Students in Canada

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“…Most studies find that females perform better than males (Casillas et al, 2012;Legewie and DiPrete, 2012;Livaditis et al, 2003;Serbin, Stack and Kingdon, 2013) and usually consider being male a risk factor for low performance. Still, some studies find that boys can also outperform girls, usually in math and science (for instance, Feinstein and Symons, 1999), or that gender is insignificant in explaining the differences in school performance (Sandilands et al, 2014). Most authors agree however that gender and socioeconomic status (SES) are closely related and should be analyzed jointly as the school or class SES has a different influence on the two genders (Legewie and DiPrete, 2012;Sandilands et al, 2014).…”

“…Still, some studies find that boys can also outperform girls, usually in math and science (for instance, Feinstein and Symons, 1999), or that gender is insignificant in explaining the differences in school performance (Sandilands et al, 2014). Most authors agree however that gender and socioeconomic status (SES) are closely related and should be analyzed jointly as the school or class SES has a different influence on the two genders (Legewie and DiPrete, 2012;Sandilands et al, 2014). SES is defined as the social status resulting from the family's social standing and economic conditions, which, in turn, depend on wealth, education, occupation of parents etc.…”

“…There are many studies investigating the effect of school context on the performance of students (Bouchamma, Lapointe and Richard, 2007;Pong and Hao, 2007;Lai, Sadoulet and de Janvry, 2011;Sandilands et al, 2014;Huang and Liang, 2016;Li, Allen and Casillas, 2017) that find a modest to large effect of school on performance. In a review of 200 papers on school climate, Thapa et al (2013) conclude that "school climate matters" private), some measures of staff quality and engagement level, school policies, rules and procedures, resources and equipment, the teacher-student ratio, and…”

“…SES is defined as the social status resulting from the family's social standing and economic conditions, which, in turn, depend on wealth, education, occupation of parents etc. (Duncan, Morris and Rodrigues, 2011;Sandilands et al, 2014;Duncan, Magnuson and Votruba-Drzal, 2017) (section 2.2 provides a further discussion on SES). According to Legewie and DiPrete (2012), boys are more sensitive to school environment and SES than girls so that a negative SES composition of a school will negatively affect their attitudes toward school, work habits and effort, and hence their performance.…”

“…Indeed, this classification is also aligned with the education function approach (see, for instance, Levacic and Vignoles, 2002). In practice, studies that examine the determinants of school performance can be classified into studies that focus on between-students differences or between-schools differences (Sandilands et al, 2014), either for a single country or in a comparative perspective. In addition, there are studies which investigate how a multitude of factors affects school performance (Livaditis et al, 2003), and studies focusing on a single factor or a single construct (for instance, school context) (Bouchamma, Lapointe and Richard, 2007).…”