| Popis: |
The aim of this paper is to study to what extent socio-economic factors affect the grade in social studies 1b in upper secondary school at municipal level during the period of 2015-2021. The method in this study is a binomial logistic regression and the dependent variable is the grade, and the independent variables are gender, background, parental education level and certified teacher. The data for the dependent and the independent variables are collected from the Swedish National Agency for Education's database Siris at municipal level and for the upper secondary school for the college preparatory programs. Data for 30 municipalities was collected and categorized according to the municipal group division from 2017 of Sweden's Municipalities and Regions. Pierre Bourdieu's capital theory about how education has a social stratification function is used to explain the results from the binomial logistic regression. The result of this paper indicates that socio-economic factors affect the grade. All the independent variables affect the grade in social studies during the different years. The independent variable parental education level affected the grade in 2015-2017 and 2020/2021. The independent variable gender affected the grade in 2017-2019. Certified teacher ratio affected the grade only in 2018/2019. The independent variable background affected the grade in 2017/2018. The binomial logistic regression indicates that the residual looks similar for all municipal groups A-C for almost all the years apart from in 2017/2018. Thus, the predictive power of the binomial logistic regression model is good for all municipal groups. The results indicate that socio-economic factors affect students' grades in social studies. This is relevant for professional teachers and school principals to be aware of in order to be able to provide all the students with an equal education regardless oft their socio-economic background. |
