Abstract:

Existing research shows that socio-emotional factors at school can be critical for academic functioning of disadvantaged students (Becker & Luthar, 2012). Since disadvantaged adolescents come from contexts which may provide limited socio-emotional support, their need for a safe and supportive school climate is even more profound (Becker & Luthar, 2012). Importantly, emotional engagement and bullying are at play not only at an individual level, but also on a group level. That is, an aggregate level of emotional school engagement and bullying in a classroom functions as a group norm. Since adolescents are increasingly dependent on peer relations (Eccles et al., 1993), they can be particularly sensitive to the effects of these group norms, however, the findings on the effects of group norms for adolescent academic functioning are somewhat contradictory (Becker & Luthar, 2012). To address the need for further research in this area, using 2-level random effects models we examined the associations between student SES, socio-emotional functioning (emotional engagement and bullying) and reading performance, controlling for gender. In addition, we tested compositional and interaction effects with respect to SES and indicators of socio-emotional functioning on achievement. We analysed nationally representative data from the National Student Achievement Survey 2012 cohort of Lithuanian 8th grade students (N=4479; 49.9% females). The results indicated significant positive effect of student SES and emotional engagement on reading performance at the individual level. Moreover, we found a presence of compositional effects, indicating that school-level SES positively and bullying negatively predicted achievement over and above the individual-level differences. Finally, our results showed there are differences between schools in the association of student SES and achievement. We discuss our results in light of implication for closing achievement gap.

Acknowledgement:
This study has received funding from European Regional Development Fund (project no 01.2.2-LMT-K-718-03-0059) under grant agreement with the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT).

Keywords:

Achievement gap, engagement, bullying, multilevel analysis.