Abstract
This study comprises two meta-analyses conducted to investigate relations between socioeconomic status (SES) and academic achievement, with a focus on macro-level, micro-level, and methodological moderating variables in primary and secondary education. The first meta-analysis is based on 326 empirical studies with 949,699 students from 47 countries and areas, and the second is based on three international large-scale assessments (i.e., PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS) with 1230 independent samples of 5,095,283 students from 105 countries and areas. We found moderate correlations between SES and academic achievement across the world, rs = .22 ~ .28. Moderation analyses revealed that (a) these relations have strengthened since the 1990s; (b) GDP per capita and economic equality did not affect the relations; (c) higher net enrollment ratio and longer duration of compulsory education did not weaken these relations; (d) the relations stayed stable or even strengthened across grades in concurrent and longitudinal designs. Taken together, our findings suggest that educational expansion that focuses on increasing educational opportunities does not seem to reduce inequalities in academic outcomes between high- and low-SES school children in educational systems on the national level. Quality indicators for educational expansion, however, should be considered in setting educational policy to achieve inclusive, equitable education.
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Notes
In order to obtain the accurate estimation, we coded the original sampling year from the primary studies; however, if the study did not specify the sampling year, we calculated the sampling year by subtracting 2 from the publishing year as suggested by Hou (2015) to get a modest estimate of sampling year. Note that participants in some empirical studies from longitudinal projects were sampled before 1990, and thus we included these studies for the overall effect analysis, but we included only studies with sampling years from 1990 to 2021 for the moderation analysis.
For empirical studies, due to limited gender information extracted from primary studies, we did not examine the moderation effect of gender. For the international large-scale assessments, we could directly estimate separate correlation coefficients for boys and girls, so we examined the moderation effect of gender. The average correlations for girls and boys were significant: boys, r = 0.28, 95% CI [.27, .28]; girls, r = 0.29, 95% CI [.29, .30]. Then we tested the moderator effect and found that the SES–academic achievement correlation for girls was significantly stronger than that for boys after controlling for other moderators, β = 0.01, t = 2.44, p = 0.01. Findings for the large assessments can be found in the Supplementary file1.
References
References for all included empirical studies can be found in the online Supplementary file1.
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This work was supported by the Major Projects of National Social Science Fund of China (project number 16ZDA229).
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Juan Liu, Peng Peng and Baobao Zhao contributed equally to this work and should be considered as co-first author. All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed and the first draft of the manuscript was written by Juan Liu and Baobao Zhao. Peng Peng guided data analysis and edited the manuscript. Liang Luo edited the manuscript and provided funding support. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Liu, J., Peng, P., Zhao, B. et al. Socioeconomic Status and Academic Achievement in Primary and Secondary Education: a Meta-analytic Review. Educ Psychol Rev 34, 2867–2896 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-022-09689-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-022-09689-y