A relation between high-school students’ achievement and their socioeconomic status in post-Yugoslav countries and Western Europe

Abstract

In the contemporary global context of growing inequalities, it is important to explore what effect socio-economic status has on educational practices and to investigate educational inequalities. Having in mind that post-Yugoslav societies have a shared past of being a part of the same socialist country, we wanted to compare the importance of socio-economic status in post-Yugoslav countries and countries with longer capitalist tradition from Western Europe. Besides, bearing in mind Serbia?s specific path towards capitalism, our goal is to compare it to other countries on the same relationship between student achievement on the external testing and socioeconomic variables. Since we tend to use a comparative approach, we utilize the data of PISA study. In order to observe the tendencies, we use the data from two waves of study (2012 and 2018). For analysis of student achievement, we rely on the students? scores on the reading, Mathematics and Science performance while the PISA?s Index of economic, social and cultural status was a proxy for the socio-economic status. Results are revealing that there is a stronger correlation between socio-economic status and student achievements in Western Europe compared to post-Yugoslav countries and that there are significant differences in the correlation between examined variables among post-Yugoslav countries.