Socio-economic status and its impact on educational achievements: direct and indirect impact

Abstract

The aim of this work is to test the hypothesis about the influence of students’ socio-economic status (SES) on their school achievement. Many studies, including PISA results, reveal positive correlation bet-ween students’ SES and their educational outcomes meaning that students with higher SES in average have higher school achievements as well. This paper is based on the assumption that the influence of students’ SES on their educational outcomes is mediated by school anxiety and intrinsic motivation, and by formative assessment done by teacher. This hypothesis implies that the influence of SES would be annulled by introducing mediating variables in the structural model. Data analysis has been done on PISA 2009 data, which is collected on representative sample of Serbian students in the secondary education, counting 4843 students in total. The results show that three mediating variables explain small part of SES effect. Among these mediating variables, the most influential mediator is school anxiety – students with lower SES, in average have higher level of school anxiety, which consequently lowers their educational outcomes. Apart from that, students’ SES does not influence significantly intrinsic motivation for school learning, which means that all students, no matter of their SES, can be motivated for school learning. Finally, the analysis revel that there is a positive correlation between SES and formative assessment done by teacher, but this correlation is very low, which means that high school teachers manage to apply encouraging practices toward all the students, no matter of their SES. Observed results suggest that, apart from the factors studied in this paper, there are some other which mediate educational outcomes.