Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of Albanian secondary schools which influence the school performance and the effects of gender and socio-economic status on reading performance of 15-year-old students. This study used data on the background and achievement of 4,596 students in 181 Albanian schools from 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Given the nested structure of the data and research questions, I used two-level Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) methods that combine a set of five plausible values for performance scores. I computed from the unconditional model that about a third of the total variance in reading performance lies between schools. Results of the within-school model show that factors like gender, family structure (two parent families versus others), socio-economic status (SES), student learning and reading engagement are significantly related to student reading performance. Considering the last three variables as statistical controls, I found out that there is a significant variability between schools for both the gender difference in student performance and the effect of SES on student performance. Between school, models show that school characteristics as school type, school SES and classroom environment are significantly related to school performance. Students attending general schools perform better than students of vocational schools after controlling for other variables. Moreover, students attending socio-economically advantaged schools have also much higher performance in reading than those attending socio-economically disadvantaged schools, regardless of their individual socio-economic background. Similarly, students from schools with a positive classroom environment tend to have better achievement in reading than students from other schools, even after accounting for differences in socio-economic status. I also revealed that school variables that influence gender effect on student performance are school administration (public/private), school location (urban/rural) and average reading engagement; and school variables that influence SES effect on student performance are school type (general/vocational), school location and average reading engagement. The characteristics of schools that make them more or less equitable are summarized and implications for educational policies and research are discussed.

Keywords:

Hierarchical linear modeling, reading performance, gender, socio-economic status, PISA.