Equity in mathematics education: A cross-national comparison

Educational research shows that socioeconomic status (SES) achievement gaps exist in a wide range of countries. This suggests that low SES students do not have the same learning opportunities in or out of school as their high SES counterparts. The impact of SES on educational outcomes may manifest itself in two ways. Firstly, a student with high SES tends to have higher academic achievement than a student with low SES. Secondly, a student attending a school with high SES tends to have higher academic achievement than a student with similar SES level attending a school with low SES. It means that academic achievement may highly be dependent on SES. This inequity is a great concern to most countries in the world. Academic achievement should not depend on SES; therefore, understanding how SES is related to achievement is particularly important in order to reduce achievement gap. Understanding the role of schools in this inequity is of great significance because school characteristics may be related to this inequity. This study pays attention to the inequity caused by school SES by assuming that a school's SES not only directly influences the students' achievement but also its school characteristics indirectly. The existence of this indirect effect as well as the direct effect can be the source of that inequity-generating structure for students. If schools were able to alter their characteristics to establish equity, this could reduce the negative effects of low SES. This study investigates the inequity explained above by focusing on mathematics education from a cross-national perspective. More specifically this study examines the relationship between school SES, school characteristics and 8th grade mathematics achievement by using the 2015 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data of 38 participating countries. Multilevel mediation analyses were used to investigate indirect effects of the school SES on mathematics achievement through school characteristics: mathematics teaching quality at school and school climate (sense of belonging to school, the importance given to success and disciplinary climate). The results of the study reveal that school SES is the most significant school characteristic determining mathematics achievement in many countries. When the quality of mathematics teaching at school and the school climate (sense of belonging to school, the importance given to success and disciplinary climate) are included in the multilevel regression analyses, it is seen that the impact of school SES decreases in many countries. This means that in these countries, quality of mathematics teaching at school, sense of belonging to school, the importance given to success and disciplinary climate can reduce the influence of school SES on mathematics achievement. School SES is also related to school climate (importance given to success, sense of school belonging and disciplinary climate) in most countries. The school characteristics, which are related to mathematics achievement, involve the mathematics teaching quality at school, the importance given to success and the sense of belonging to the school. In sum, these relationships suggest that school SES has an indirect effect on mathematics achievement through school characteristics; the sense of belonging to school, the importance given to success and disciplinary climate. The sense of belonging to the school especially seems to be a prominent mediator between school SES and mathematics achievement in developed countries. In addition, the importance given to success is a mediator in both developed and developing countries. In conclusion, it is seen that the mathematics teaching quality at school and school climate characteristics alleviate school SES-related inequities in most countries, but when the mediation effect is examined, it is seen that only school climate characteristics may mediate the effect of school SES on mathematics achievement. This mediation effect can help to understand the mechanisms of inequity through schools. Accordingly, it is seen that the inequity related to school SES might not be mediated through mathematics teaching quality at school. In addition, in order to eliminate the mediating role of sense of belonging and disciplinary climate, low SES schools could provide their students with a safer and more supportive climate and thus ensure for them a deeper sense of belonging to school.