School Culture and Immigrant Students: Resources and Achievement Differences

Abstract

Research has shown that the resources that non-native children have in school vary in a significant manner even in the schools of the same geographical area. Do these differences explain significant gaps in students’ academic achievements? The resources matter addresses the proficiency assessment that some schools hold and other not? And, which other variables (e.g. mother tongue and nationality effect) and with type of achievement (e.g. verbal reasoning, vocabulary, foreign accent) are affected in behalf of schools’ structure? This paper examines the effects of schools and their existing resources (including proficiency tests) on young immigrants' achievement for verbal reasoning, vocabulary, metaphoric language and other language tasks, which include data samples from 36 Portuguese immigrant students. We completed a Structural Equation Model (SEM), using AMOS, to perform a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to confirm if the tests’ scores are significantly impacted by school variable and by its resources (those resources developed for immigrant children). The practices and perceived resources in schools are found as having significant effect on test scores and the effect was observed with negative impact specifically for students who are placed in schools with no support measures and with differentiated teaching practices for low proficiency groups. Analyses showed that nationality, mother tongue but not the socioeconomic variable increase value as predictive variable only when school effect is controlled for the several tasks. In fact, SES revealed predictive power in confirmatory analysis but not necessarily correlated with school. CFA confirmed the influence of school variable but also the resource of proficiency tests at schools as predictors for achievement, more prominent when compared to the other variables such as mother tongue or nationality. Also, evidence suggests in this study that the differences among learners increased concerning the number and variability of language and reasoning tasks when the type of school is tested as main variable or covariate.