School climate is the variable with the strongest impact on achievement among Latin American students

Results of the Second Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study, SERCE

• © UNESCO

According to the Second Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (SERCE), in order to promote learning among students it is essential to provide a welcoming and warm environment based on mutual respect. The Study’s results were presented simultaneously in all sixteen participating national entities - 15 Latin American* countries and in the Mexican State of Nuevo Leon - on June 20th in Santiago, Chile.

Research conducted by the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education in sixteen countries and the Mexican State of Nuevo Leon also reveals the influence of income distribution on student learning.
A total of some two-hundred thousand students distributed into 8,500 classrooms and 3.000 schools were evaluated.

The impact of school climate on student performance is one of the conclusions derived from this Study, one of the most important and ambitious student performance evaluation projects ever launched in Latin America and the Caribbean. Led by UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (OREALC/UNESCO Santiago), the Survey was coordinated and implemented by the Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE).

Rosa Blanco, a.i. Director of UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Héctor Valdés, project Director and General Co-ordinator of the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education, presented the Study’s findings.

The Study targeted Third and Sixth Grade Primary Education students who were administered especially designed Mathematics, Language (Reading and Writing) and Natural Science tests. In addition to academic performance data, SERCE collects background information on students and their families, school teachers and directors, in order to identify and gain insight into the factors that have the strongest influence on student performance.

The Study reveals that school conditions can have an important effect on student performance, even beyond socioeconomic factors, and contribute significantly to reducing the learning gap associated with social inequality. However, school segregation based on students’ socioeconomic and cultural background, has been found to be negatively correlated to student performance and is the second most important variable to explain performance. Thus, the equitable distribution of learning across the different social strata of the population remains, according to this Report, a pending task.

Equity: a pending task
A review of the major Study results shows that learning is not equitably distributed across the various social strata as corroborated by the significant differences in quality education detected within and among countries.

One of the factors that account for this inequality has an economic component relating specifically to the production and distribution of income among participating countries. This would explain why high-income countries such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay show better overall results.

Additionally, within countries, school location is yet another factor responsible for generating differences in student performance. In Latin America and the Caribbean, rural school boys and girls show lower levels of performance when compared to their urban school counterparts.

The Study also looked into factors associated with students’ cognitive gains and found that the quality of Latin American and Caribbean schools account for 40% to 49% of students’ learning results. This confirms that school climate along with the schools’ average socioeconomic/cultural background represent the main performance variables, with the rest of the student achievement-related variances being attributable to the socioeconomic/cultural differences inherent to the students and families themselves.

The Second Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (2004 – 2008) involved the participation of 100,752 Third Grade students and 95,288 Sixth Grade students evaluated in the areas of Mathematics, Reading and Natural Science, in sixteen Latin American countries and the Mexican State of Nuevo Leon.

Several evaluator, pedagogical and curricular specialist teams alongside regional monitors, and technical and instrument development experts worked together to turn this initiative into a space of collaboration, learning and technical capacity–building for the national teams involved in the SERCE.

Its conceptual frame, based on the testing of curricular elements known to be common to the region, was inspired on UNESCO’s life-skills approach. This approach establishes the abilities, principles, values and attitudes that Latin American students should learn to develop in order to ensure their full and active participation in society, both as actors and citizens.

In addition to evaluating learning, SERCE administered questionnaires to students, teachers, principals, and parents of the sampled schools in order to generate data that may help identify those factors that have the greatest impact on student learning.

The First SERCE Report, its Executive Summary and a video on its characteristics and results are available at: www.unesco.cl/esp/serce

*Participating countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay.

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• Author(s):OREALC/UNESCO Santiago
• Source:OREALC/UNESCO Santiago
• 23-06-2008