EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Socioeconomic Status and School Type as Predictors of Academic Achievement

H. Eren Suna (herensuna@gmail.com), Hande Tanberkan, Bekir S. Gür, Matjaz Perc and Mahmut Özer
Additional contact information
H. Eren Suna: Ministry of National Education, Ankara, Turkey
Hande Tanberkan: Ministry of National Education, Ankara, Turkey
Bekir S. Gür: Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Department of Media and Communication, Ankara, Turkey
Matjaz Perc: University of Maribor, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Maribor, Slovenia
Mahmut Özer: Ministry of National Education, Ankara, Turkey

Journal of Economy Culture and Society, 2020, vol. 61, issue 0, 41-64

Abstract: We evaluated the effects of socioeconomic status and school type on academic achievement based on data from two million students over a 10 year period through three national transition systems in Turkey. Each of the three transition systems has its own national examination, and the data includes only students who took these exams. We used covariance analysis to compare the mean scores of public schools and private schools after controlling the effect of students’ socioeconomic levels. We found that students in private schools, who were socioeconomically stronger, had significantly higher academic achievement levels in language, mathematics, and science tests, and this finding was valid across all three transition systems. These effects were further exuberated when all the students were tracked by means of a national exam and placed into different high schools. It was found that the negative impact of one’s socioeconomic level on students’ scores reached its maximum value when all students were placed into high schools by means of a national exam. In all systems, the mean scores of private school students decreased significantly when the socioeconomic level was controlled. Our research has important implications for school tracking policies, specifically indicating that it would be better to omit or at least delay their deployment to post high-school education.

Keywords: School tracking; socioeconomic status; academic achievement; school type; transition systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/1121054 (application/pdf)
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/jecs/issue/55581/716748 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ist:iujecs:v:61:y:2020:i:0:p:41-64

DOI: 10.26650/JECS2020-0034

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economy Culture and Society is currently edited by Veysel Bozkurt

More articles in Journal of Economy Culture and Society from Istanbul University, Faculty of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ertugrul YASAR (dergidestek@entertech.com.tr).

 
Page updated 2023-11-11
Handle: RePEc:ist:iujecs:v:61:y:2020:i:0:p:41-64