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Проблема контекстуализации образовательных результатов: школы, социальный состав учащихся и уровень депривации территорий
In the study at hand, we focus on how social contexts promote academic performance disparities between Russian high schools. In particular, we investigate how a school's average USE (Unified State Examination) scores in Russian and mathematics relate to the social composition of its student body, material and human resources, and local deprivation. We develop a two-level hierarchical regression model to analyze data from school profiles collected in two Russian regions (Yaroslavskaya Oblast’ and Moskovskaya Oblast’) during the 2011-12 academic year. Both social characteristics of the student body as well as the schools' material and human resources were associated with academic performance. However, after controlling for the characteristics of pupils and schools, our study did not discover any significant independent effects of the local context. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to developing contextualized measures of academic performance in Russia, and show how such measures could be used to identify cases of “resilient” and “failing” schools for the purposes of more accurate evaluations. In conclusion, we discuss the limitations of the current research and suggest several possibilities for empirical development.