The Impact of Student Characteristics on Student Achievement: A Review of the Literature

Abstract

This chapter provides a review of literature on student factors associated with student learning outcomes. Since equity is measured by investigating the impact that SES has on student achievement, the first part of this chapter presents the results of national and international studies investigating this impact. Moreover, we refer to a framework that can guide research on promoting equity and help us establish evaluation mechanisms for measuring the impact of teachers and students in reducing unjustifiable differences in student learning outcomes. In the second part of this chapter, we refer to the student-level factors of the dynamic model of educational effectiveness which classifies such factors into three categories: (a) sociocultural and economical background variables associated with the sociological perspective of EER, such as gender and SES; (b) background variables linked to the psychological perspective of EER, such as personality traits and thinking styles; and (c) variables related to specific learning tasks associated with the learning outcomes used to measure effectiveness such as prior achievement, time on task and opportunity to learn. Moreover, a distinction is drawn with respect to the student-level factors by referring to those which are unlikely to change (e.g., gender, SES, ethnicity) and others that may change over time (e.g., subject motivation, thinking styles). This distinction is relevant to our attempt to measure equity in education since teachers and other stakeholders are expected to reduce the impact of factors that are unlikely to change on student learning outcomes in order to establish a fair class/school/educational system.