Session Information
09 SES 11 A, Findings from International Comparative Achievement Studies: Social Disparities and Student Achievement
Paper Session
Contribution
Performance at school depends on the students’ socioeconomic status (SES), particularly distinct in Germany (e.g. Bos, Schwippert & Stubbe 2007). Traceable, as national and international assessment programmes document, the german schoolsystem still is not successful in reducing socially determined inequality (e.g. Becker & Lauterbach 2004). It is interdisciplinary seen that students’ poor language skills are considered as causes for their failure (e.g. Heinze et al. 2008). The language of school as well as the terminology of each subject (‚technical language’) are classified as indispensable in every subject for students individual performance at school (e.g. Bernstein 1971a/b, Schleppegrell 2004).
In educational policy discussions, performance at school is currently defined through students higher or lower abilities in (inter-)national student achievement tests (e.g. Stanat & Christensen 2006). Thus, student achievement tests are used in this study to find out how german students with low SES handle test-items. Using the example of exemplarily selected test-items in the key subjects German (from: Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS 2006), domain: reading comprehension) and Mathematics (from: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2007), domain: mathematics) there will be discribed and analysed, which decisive characteristics for difficulties (focus on: language and subject-specific characteristics) exists in test-items and wherein challenges are located by handling these test-items. Indeed, do they fail on the subject-specific, cognitive request level of a test-item? Or do (subject-specific-)language barriers complicate the handling of test-items, like gathering focal textinformation or decoding subject-specific terminologies? Hence, there will be analysed two levels: On the one hand test-items in terms of their subject-specific and language quality (level of test-items), on the other hand the students’ cognitive and language dispositions (level of students). We assume that in this field of different language skills (focus on: language of school and technical language) it will be possible to discuss performance at school in terms of success and failure in a promising way.
In the 1960s, Basil Bernstein observed as a cause for the poor performace at school of students with low SES that there is a gap between different speech variants: the „formal language“ (Bernstein 1971a, later called „elaborated code“, used mainly from middle-class students) and the „public language“ (ib., later called „restricted code“, used mainly from working-class students). As Bernstein turned out, knowledge of school – mainly mediated by the language of school and technical language - is based on the ‚elaborated code’, so that the ‚linguistic code’, a child mainly controlled by entering school, early determine his performance at school (Bernstein 1971b). Although his studies were criticied and considered to be non-empirically portable, there is an increasing interest on Bernsteins thoughts for several years (e.g. Steinig et al. 2009).
The relation of language and performance at school will be theoretically described on the basis of test-items by using Bernsteins focal question about the coherence between socioeconomic status, students speech variants and participation in knowledge of school, and as a consequence thereof the ‚language determined’ inequality (cf. Bernstein 1971b).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Becker, R. & Lauterbach, W. (Eds.). (2004). Bildung als Privileg? Erklärungen und Befunde zu den Ursachen der Bildungsungleichheit. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Bernstein, B. (1971a). Some sociological determinants of perception (pp. 23-41) and Bernstein, B. (1971b). A socio-linguistic approach to socialization: with some reference to educability (pp. 143-169). In Bernstein, B. (Eds.). (1971). Class, Codes and Control. Volume I. Theoretical Studien towards a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge. Bos, W., Schwippert, K. & Stubbe, T. C. (2007). Die Koppelung von sozialer Herkunft und Schülerleistung im internationalen Vergleich. In W. Bos, S. Hornberg, K.-H. Arnold, G. Faust, L. Fried, E.-M. Lankes, K. Schwippert & R. Valtin (Eds.). IGLU 2006. Lesekompetenzen von Grundschulkindern in Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich, Münster: Waxmann. pp. 225-247 Heinze, A., Reiss, K., Rudolph-Albert, F., Herwartz-Emden, L. & Braun, C. (2008). The development of mathematical competence of migrant children in German primary schools. In M. Tzekaki et al. (Eds.). Proceedings of 33rd PME, Thessaloniki, 3, pp. 145-153. Holland, P. W. & Wainer, H. (Eds.). (1993). Differential Item Functioning, New York: Erlbaum. Magis, D., Beland, S. & Raiche, G. (2009). difR: Collection of methods to detect dichotomous differential item functioning (DIF) in psychometrics. R package version 2.1 R Development Core Team (2009). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0, URL http://www.R-project.org Schleppegrell, M. J. (Eds.). (2004). The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective. New Jersey: Erlbaum. Stanat, P. & Christensen, G. (Eds.). (2006). Where immigrant Students Succeed: A Comparative Review of Performance and Engagement in PISA 2003. Paris: OECD. Steinig, W., Betzel, D., Geider, F. J. & Herbold, A. (Eds.). (2009). Schreiben von Kindern im diachronen Vergleich. Texte von Viertklässlern aus den Jahren 1972 und 2002. Münster: Waxmann.
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