Influence of individual and contextual, variables on learning at the end of the primary

Abstract

Several national and international studies have shown that the variations in the learning of the Mexican student body are associated to socioeconomic, personal and contextual variables among others. In the present work, through the multilevel hierarchical modeling, the effect of the personal and context variables in the learning of the mathematical competences and reading comprehension in the sixth-grade students from two different educational contexts (private school and indigenous public-rural). Likewise, personal variables of the student, such as age, sex, grade level, etc., were included in the analysis. The results obtained show that, controlling the effect of the context of origin, the educational performance in Reading Comprehension and in Mathematics, are explained to a greater extent by the individual differences; and, when individual differences were controlled, the variability in learning is sensitive to the context of origin. The results obtained confirm the findings of other studies which show that the type of school support is a variable that influences achievement: the population of private schools comes, for the most part, from homes with a high socio-economic level, attend come from a socioeconomic level above its counterpart that receives the public-rural-indigenous service