ASSOCIATION BETWEEN CLASS HETEROGENEITY AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT IN PRIMARY SCHOOL (THE EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIA)

The International Performance Indicators in Primary Schools (iPIPS) is a instrument of entering children’s diagnostic in primary school and assessing their individual progress during the first year of study.

This instrument shows the amount of children’s knowledge and skills at the entrance of primary school in two principal areas - reading and math. Additionally, the complex set of questionnaires allows to investigate how these results are related to family background, parental educational practices, child’s pre-school educational experience and her or his psychological characteristics as well as factors of school educational environment. Finally, evaluation at the end of the first grade measures the progress children achieve during this academic year under the influence of all the factors above. Computer Adaptive Testing with implementation of Item Response Theory algorithm allows to link precisely child’s ability level on these two stages of evaluation.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the association of the heterogeneity of classes and academic achievement in primary school. It is clearly shown in literature that the degree of class heterogeneity is closely connected to academic achievement even if other multiple covariates are controlled. However, these studies seldom measure the children’s progress itself. Usually it is non-experimental studies based on small non-representative samples. Moreover, most of researches in this field don’t measure other heterogeneity effects in primary school. Also, usual ways of constructing indexes of class heterogeneity are strongly criticized in recent years.

Thus, we can notice the deficit of important information in this area. To resolve this issue we use iPIPS project databases collected in Russia in 2015-2016 academic year. The main method we used is Multi-level Hierarchical Modeling.

Results show that constructed index of class heterogeneity is closely connected with academic achievement. The new way of heterogeneity index constructing can resolve many of criticism issues. Application of study results may help to develop guidelines for grouping children into classes in primary school.