Weak Class Level Affects Immigrant Children’s Performance

Immigrant children’s academic performance suffers particularly when their class at school has a large number of low performers. This applies to pupils who come from a disadvantaged background, have a lower level of academic achievement, do not speak the local language at home, or whose parents were both born abroad. The proportion of low-achieving classmates has no effect on pupils with an immigration background who are better off. These are findings of researchers from the ifo Institute and the University of Milano-Bicocca based on data from Italy. “To better support pupils with an immigration background, we suggest mixing classes more in terms of performance level,” say Vera Freundl and Caterina Pavese from the ifo Institute.

“In view of the increased number of children with an immigration background, it’s important to take measures to support and integrate them at school,” Pavese adds. An increase in low-achieving classmates by 10 percentage points – that corresponds to two pupils in an average class of 20 children – worsens the performance of children with an immigration background by around 0.75 points. Conversely, pupils with an immigration background who are socio-economically better off are positively influenced by the proportion of their highest-achieving classmates.

The researchers observed other effects for native pupils: the proportion of low-achieving classmates does not negatively affect their performance. In fact, native students benefit when their class has a high average test performance. Interestingly, these schoolchildren are also influenced only by other native pupils; the performance of children with an immigration background is irrelevant to their test performance.