Country and school family composition’s effects on mathematics achievement

Abstract

Family structures are associated with achievement outcomes, but the percentage of children residing in different family structures has changed over time. In this paper, we revisit data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to determine whether previous findings have also changed over time. Drawing on PISA 2012, we employ multilevel modelling to examine whether school and country compositional factors are still salient a decade later. The final analytical sample included 172,452 students in 7,391 schools from 24 countries. The results indicate, like previous research, an educational disadvantage for students that attend schools with a large concentration of children from single-parent homes. However, this disadvantage is largely due to the lower socioeconomic composition of these schools. At the country level, there is little support for the hypothesis that the achievement gap between students from two- versus one-parent households is greater in countries with higher percentages of single-parent families.