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Educational outcomes for children of immigrants
The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assesses student knowledge and skills in mathematics, science, reading and cross-curricular competencies at age 15, i.e. towards the end of compulsory education.
PISA also asked students about their country of birth and the country of birth of their parents, which makes it possible to identify children with a migration background and to compare their educational outcomes with those of native students.
Definition
On the PISA Survey, see the Factbook section on Education Outcomes.
Second generation refers to native-born students both of whose parents are foreign-born. Immigrant students are students who are foreign-born. Natives are native-born students who have at least one parent who is native-born.
The figures show the points differences in the PISA (2003) scores for mathematical and reading literacy between native-born, on the one hand, and immigrant and second generation students, on the other. A positive difference means that children of immigrants are trailing behind children of the native-born.
"Unadjusted” refers to the observed points differences in the raw scores, "adjusted” to the differences after adjusting for the effect of differences in socio-economic background of students. The socio-economic background is a composite indicator, based on the following variables: the Highest International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status (HISEI), the highest level of education of the student’s parents, the index of home educational resources and the index of possessions. For each test, the mean score across all OECD countries was standardised to 500 points, with a standard deviation of 100 points.
The unadjusted differences for mathematics are not significantly different from zero for Australia, Canada and only for immigrant students in New Zealand. After adjustment, the point differences are not significant in Australia and the United States. On the reading scale, the unadjusted differences are not significant for second generation students in Australia. The adjusted differences are not significantly different from zero for the second generation in Australia, Denmark, France, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States.
Comparability
More than 220 000 students were assessed in OECD countries for PISA 2003. Immigrants and second generation represented about five and four per cent, respectively, of the total 15-year‑old student population in the OECD. Only for countries where the share of students with a migration background was sufficiently large could the differences vis-à-vis natives be calculated. Values that are not statistically significantly different from zero are not shown in the graph. OECD countries that are not shown in the table are those for which the sample sizes were insufficient to ensure reliable estimates.
The outcomes for the second generation are of particular interest, since these students have been born in the respective countries and thus, in principle, were educated in the same educational system as natives. This is not necessarily the case for students who are immigrants themselves, since some of them may have immigrated after some years of schooling abroad. It is thus more difficult to interpret gaps between natives and immigrants than between natives and the second generation.
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Overview The second generation now constitutes a significant and growing share of students in many OECD countries and their integration is of increasing policy concern, particularly in Europe. In the OECD area as a whole, they tend to perform better than immigrant students, as one would expect since the former have been born in the country of assessment and were entirely educated in the host country. In most countries for which data are available, there are nevertheless significant gaps between natives and the second generation. This is particularly the case for Germany and Belgium, where the gaps in the raw scores for the second generation amount to the equivalent of about two years of schooling. Gaps are also large in Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria and France, but tend to be small or even insignificant in the traditional immigration countries. Adjusting for socio-economic background generally reduces the gaps by about half, but even then, second generation students often remain at a substantial disadvantage, particularly in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria. |
Source
Further information
Analytical publications
- OECD (2006), Where Immigrant Students Succeed: A Comparative Review of Performance and Engagement in PISA 2003, OECD, Paris.
| Texts | |
| • | Indicator web page |
| • | Indicator in PDF |
| Tables (xls) | |
| • | PISA results for children of immigrants |
| Graphics | |
| • | Reading performance of the second generation |
Reading performance of the second generation
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