Heterogeneity, school-effects and achievement gaps across Italian regions: further evidence from statistical modeling

07/2014

Heterogeneity, school-effects and achievement gaps across Italian regions: further evidence from statistical modeling

Friday 31st January 2014

Agasisti, T.; Ieva, F.; Paganoni, A.M.

Catching the differences in educational attainments between groups of students and across schools is becoming increasingly interesting. With the aim of assessing the extent of these differences in the context of Italian educational system, the paper applies multilevel modeling to a new administrative dataset, containing detailed information for more than 500,000 students at grade 6 in the year 2011/12, provided by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of Educational System. The results show that the national averages hide considerable heterogeneity both within and between schools, and that it is possible to estimate statistically significant school effects , i.e. the positive/negative impact of attending a specific school on the student s test score, after a case-mix adjustment. Therefore, the paper s most important message is that school effects are different in terms of magnitude and types in the three geographical macro-areas (Northern, Central and Southern Italy) and are dependent upon specific students characteristics.

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Accepted for publication: "Statistical Methods And Applications" doi: 10.1007/s10260-016-0363-x (2016)