Student and school SES, gender, strategy use, and achievement

Abstract

A multilevel mediated regression model was fit to Programme for International Student Assessment achievement, strategy use, gender, and family-and school-level socioeconomic status (SES). Two metacognitive strategies (i.e., understanding and summarizing) and one learning strategy (i.e., control strategies) were found to relate significantly and positively to achievement. These strategies were used more by females and students attending higher SES schools.In contrast, males and students attending lower SES schools tended to use a greater number of learning strategies that did not relate to achievement, including memorization and elaboration. In addition, the strategies that did not relate to achievement were used more frequently by students from higher SES families. The findings suggest that schools, as opposed to families, may be the primary vehicle for developing effective strategy use practices for students and thus, targeted interventions may be particularly useful for male students attending low SES schools. K E Y W O R D Sdemographics, metacognition, strategy use

Improving Kenyan Secondary School students’ relationship with mathematics through self-regulated learning

“…Indeed, parallel findings were arrived at from a study by Callan et al (2017) which explored among other factors the relations between students' family and school SES and their use of a number of self-regulated learning strategies in learning mathematics, reading and science.…”

“…In a similar vein, one can deduce a link between SES and students' capacity to self-regulate their learning behaviours through self -monitoring and evaluation from study findings that have linked family and school SES to students': academic goal orientations and use of different learning strategies (Berger & Archer 2016;Callan et al 2016); and their language proficiency and acquisition (Callan et al 2017;Jorgensen, Gates & Roper 2014). For example, findings from a study by Berger and Archer (2016) involving students from two high schools in Australia suggest that students from high SES backgrounds are likely to adopt mastery approach-oriented academic goals than their counterparts who were found to be more inclined towards performance-avoidance academic goals.…”

“…In recent years, there has been growing interest in exploring the impact of collective SES (district, school, country), especially school SES, on students' academic achievement. Though at its nascent stages, findings from studies on the association of school educational attainment and the two (family and collective) sets of SES suggest that variation in student academic achievement may be attributed more to school SES than family SES (Callan et al 2017).…”

“…As is the case with family SES, the availability of resources (more teachers, textbooks, learning spaces, including libraries) in high SES schools has been found (Callan et al 2017) to be useful in creating an environment that is more conducive, both in terms of structure and supportive emotional environment, for supporting and facilitating self-regulated learning.…”

“…The findings support recent studies (cf. Callan et al 2017) that identify self-regulated learning as one of the academic enablers influenced by parental involvement in adolescent students' learning. A majority of the students also identified other members of the family as key in their self-regulation during their learning of mathematics at home.…”