Article
Factors of student resilience obtained from TIMSS and PISA longitudinal studies
It is well established that family socio-economic status (SES) is strongly related to academic performance. Nonetheless, there is a group of children with high levels of academic achievement who come from disadvantaged family backgrounds. These children possess what is called ‘academic resilience’. In our study, we want to see whether the two largest international comparative studies are consistent in terms of identifying resilient students and whether the factors of academic resilience are common for the two studies. We use data from a Russian longitudinal study Trajectories in Education and Careers (TrEC), in which students' achievement was measured with both the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS, 8th grade) and, a year later, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Our study focuses on the relationship between individual and school-related factors of resilience and whether these factors are specific to a particular educational outcome (TIMSS or PISA), or are of a more universal nature. We show that attitudes towards mathematics and test scores in general are positively related to the probability of becoming a resilient student. We also find that school related variables (such as average school SES and school type) are more significant for TIMSS than for PISA results. Our study shows that there are students who are both TIMSS and PISA resilient.
This chapter examines the characteristics of high- and low-performing schools in disadvantaged areas of rural Russia. It first provides a historical context of the persistent spatial inequalities that differentially shape opportunities for rural youth, with a specific focus on the differences in academic outcomes and opportunities for rural and urban graduates. The last section of the chapter describes a qualitative study conducted in rural schools in two very different regions of the Russian Federation: the Tomsk Oblast region and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). A wide range of factors, including school characteristics, family, environment, as well as individual knowledge and experiences, shape school experiences. The chapter identifies effective and ineffective practices used by schools and educational leaders within disadvantaged rural communities but notes that, in the context of rural depopulation and economic decline, “effective” education that enables young people to take advantage of largely urban opportunities may simply hasten the decline and abandonment of rural villages.
In this paper, we develop a multi-level comparative approach to analyse Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS) and Programme of International Student Achievement (PISA) mathematics results for a country, Russia, where the two tests provide contradictory information about students’ relative performance. Russian students do relatively well on the TIMSS mathematics test but relatively poorly on the PISA. We compare the performance of Russian students with different levels of family academic resources over the past decade on these tests compared to students with similar family resources in Russia’s neighbours and to Russian students studying in Latvian and Estonian Russian-medium schools. These comparisons and interviews with educators in Latvia and Estonia help us understand why students in Russia may perform lower on the PISA and to draw education policy lessons for improving international test performance generally and Russian students’ PISA mathematics performance specifically
The issue presents an analysis of the association between the functional literacy and students' characteristics and educational trajectories. The analysis is conducted on the data of the Russian longitudinal study "Trajectories in education and profession." The differences in socio-economic characteristics, academic self-esteem and performance, as well as the choice of educational trajectories among students with low, medium and high level of functional literacy in PISA-2012 are described. The results show that students with low literacy levels not only have low educational results, but also less realistic forecast their future achievements and trajectories.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.