Abstract:

It is known that the social and economic status of a student’s family is strongly related to their academic results, particularly to school achievements. There are children from low SES families who attained high academic results - resilient children. It is particularly interesting to study that group to understand social inequality and ways to overcome it. What are the personal and school factors that lead to the situation: when a student, contrary to what is expected, attains high academic results and gets a chance to a higher social status than their parents, thus fulfilling upward social mobility? In our study we were trying to answer the following questions. Which school and personal characteristics are related to resilience? Which schools enable the appearance of resilient students? We used the data of longitudinal panel research aimed at studying educational and labour trajectories. This research was launched in 2010-2011, when students were in the 8th form and took part in the TIMSS (4893 students). After the same students were questioned in the 9th form with the help of the PISA instruments (4399 students). All the statistical calculations were made separately for the TIMSS-resilient student and the PISA-resilient student groups.

To begin, we compared students attitude towards the educational process, math lessons, as well as the relationship with the teachers. The first results showed that resilient students are more involved in school activities, have higher value mathematics lessons and appreciate the importance of its study.

Next step is institutional level analysis – examination of resilient schools. We reveal 7 resilient schools showing high results in PISA and 15 resilient schools showing high results in TIMSS. Most of these schools are rural what is a typical location for schools with low SES. We suppose that such schools are able to arouse interest towards subject and transmit high expectations. That is the main difference from non-resilient schools working in the same environment. We also distinguished schools with a high percentage of resilient students which we call ‘nests of resilience’. There is a great share of elite schools (lyceum and gymnasiums) with high quality education demand and schools with high SES students which help low SES students to achieve higher results.

Finally, regression models were built to understand whether these factors are universal or exclusive to resilient children. The results show, that if a student thinks that his/her teacher has great expectations from him/her, it makes a student more involved in the subject and raise his/her test results. Resilient students believe that their teachers expect from them high academic outcome. Those beliefs are also connected with positive attitude towards mathematics. The same factors are also important to achieve high educational results. However, for low SES students those factors are crucial to overcome adverse conditions and achieve high results. Without high expectations atmosphere, positive attitude towards mathematics they do not have a chance to jump out their environment.

Keywords:

Academic resiliency, social-economic background, teacher’s expectations.