Immigrant Students’ Achievements in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia in Context

Abstract

Achievement gaps between immigrant and native students indicate failure to assure educational equity in the majority of countries assessed by the Programme for International Student Assessment in 2009 (PISA, 2009). The present article explains disparate achievement results in Europe, first testing the hypothesis of old and new democracies. In further contextualisation of the achievement results, the analysis seeks explanations beyond the common education system explanatory model. Specifically, the article considers results from Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, highlighting the significance of language distance between native and immigrant students as well as migration regimes as important factors in creating or reducing the achievement gap between native and immigrant students. Evidence has been found that immigrant students score worse in countries with guest labour immigration regimes than in the countries with large scale forced immigration of people of the same ethnic(linguistic) origin.

Where Do You Come from, where Do You Go? Assessing Skills Gaps and Labour Market Outcomes of Young Adults with Different Immigration Backgrounds

“…Family background and its impact on student achievement is well established in the literature. Research using cross-national data from the 2000, 2003, and 2009 PISA assessments identify immigrant achievement gaps in literacy and numeracy ranging between 30 and 80 points, relative to the OECD average of 500 points (Azzolini et al, 2012;Levels et al, 2008;Marks, 2005;Sori et al, 2011). In these studies, the primary determinants of the immigrant achievement gap are family background variables, including socio-economic status, home-language, 1 parental education, and family structure.…”