Can students themselves narrow the socioeconomic-status-based achievement gap through their own persistence and learning time?

Abstract

Despite decades of educational reforms, the achievement gap based on socioeconomic status (SES) persists in the United States. Not only does the SES-based achievement gap persist, it has also been widening. This study focused on the role of students, hypothesizing that students might reduce the SES-based achievement gap by increasing their learning time and persistence. I used both ANOVA and two-level hierarchical linear models (HLM) to analyze the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) United States data. The findings suggested that students viewing themselves to be persistent were likely to perform better than those viewing themselves to be less persistent. Also increased time learning in school was associated with increased achievement. However, high-SES students generally spent more time learning in school and viewed themselves to be more persistent. Thus learning time and persistence were not likely to address the SES constraint on achievement for a majority of low-SES students unless schools provided them extra classes and learning opportunities.

Development and Validation of the Foreign Language Learning Effort Scale for Turkish Tertiary-Level Students

“…Previously constructed measures of learning effort are single scales that mask the multifaceted nature of the construct. While some scholars have called for the need to construct better measures of learning effort (Huang, 2015;Rau & Durand, 2000), others have pointed to the scarcity of theoretical and empirical research due to the hardship of measuring effort (Kuehn & Landeras, 2013). In the same vein, no scale is found to our knowledge to have been designed to measure FLLE as a distinct construct.…”

Do disadvantaged schools have poorer teachers? Rethinking assumptions about the relationship between teaching quality and school-level advantage

“…Despite relentless political and media positioning of teachers as a major problem driving disparate student achievement, countless academics before us have argued that schools are not failing (Dinham, 2015 ; Scholes et al, 2017 ; Thrupp, 2007 ). For example, there is clear evidence that government schools, in general, perform well on standardised tests once student-background characteristics are accounted for (Sakellariou, 2017 )—a significant result given that student-background factors have the largest known influence on student success (Borman & Kimball, 2005 ; Downey & Condron, 2016 ; Huang, 2015 ; Thrupp, 2007 ). As Downey and Condron ( 2016 ) argue: socioeconomic achievement gaps form primarily before formal schooling and schools probably do more to reduce than increase them.…”

“…Furthermore, evidence from our own studies demonstrates that teaching practice can indeed be improved (Gore et al, 2017 ), with teacher capability unlikely to be the ‘issue’. Indeed, evidence that teachers, while the most important measured in-school contributor to student achievement, may have less influence on achievement than students’ background characteristics (Borman & Kimball, 2005 ; Huang, 2015 ) is often neglected in policy discussions about teachers and school performance (Vickers, 2015 ).…”

Edad relativa y resultados escolares en educación primaria en la Comunidad Autónoma de Cantabria

“…Numerosos estudios han analizado los resultados académicos del alumnado en función del contexto socio-económico de las familias, estando reconocida la necesidad de contemplar el valor añadido de la nota en función del mismo (Ballou, 2004;Ferrao, 2009;Huang, 2015;Lizasoain, 2007;McCaffrey, 2003;Robledo, 2009;Sammons, 2007). Sin embargo, la evidencia sobre el impacto del mes de nacimiento en los resultados escolares es todavía escasa.…”