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Why is it that children of immigrants often outdo their ethnic majority peers in educational aspirations yet struggle to keep pace with their achievements? This article advances the explanation that many immigrant communities, while positively selected on education, still have moderate absolute levels of schooling. Therefore, parents’ education may imbue children with high expectations but not always the means to fulfill them. Swedish data on children of immigrants from over 100 countries of origin support this view: Net of parents’ absolute years of schooling, a high rank in the sending country benefits children’s aspirations, attitudes, and educational choices but not their test scores or school grades. The upshot is an “aspiration squeeze” where to emulate their parents’ relative place in the education distribution, children are left struggling against the momentous tide of educational expansion.

Since 1992, the UK Government has published so-called 'school league tables' summarising the average General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) 'attainment' and 'progress' made by pupils in each state-funded secondary school in England. While the headline measure of school attainment has remained the percentage of pupils achieving five or more good GCSEs, the headline measure of school progress has changed from 'value-added' (2002-2005) to 'contextual value-added' (2006-2010) to 'expected progress' (2011-2015) to 'progress 8' (2016-). This paper charts this evolution with a critical eye. First, we describe the headline measures of school progress. Second, we question the Government's justifications for scrapping contextual value-added. Third, we argue that the current expected progress measure suffers from fundamental design flaws. Fourth, we examine the stability of school rankings across contextual value-added and expected progress. Fifth, we discuss the extent to which progress 8 will address the weaknesses of expected progress. We conclude that all these progress measures and school league tables more generally should be viewed with far more scepticism and interpreted far more cautiously than they have often been to date.

Occupational future time perspective (OFTP) refers to employees' perceptions of their future in the employment context. Based on lifespan and organizational psychology theories, we review research on OFTP and offer a meta-analysis of antecedents and outcomes of OFTP (K = 40 independent samples, N = 19,112 workers). Results show that OFTP is associated with individual characteristics and personal resources, including age (ρ = −0.55), job tenure (ρ = −0.23), organizational tenure (ρ = −0.25), educational level (ρ = 0.16), and self-rated physical health (ρ = 0.16), as well as job characteristics, such as job autonomy (ρ = 0.22). Moreover, OFTP is related to important work outcomes, including job satisfaction (ρ = 0.28), organizational commitment (ρ = 0.41), work engagement (ρ = 0.22), retirement intentions (ρ = −0.37), and work continuance intentions (ρ = 0.16). OFTP is also related to task (ρ = 0.11) and contextual performance (ρ = 0.20). Additional analyses show that OFTP predicts job attitudes and work performance above and beyond the effects of another developmental regulation construct, selection, optimization, and compensation strategies. Overall, the findings of our meta-analysis suggest that OFTP is an important construct in the context of an aging workforce.

Although research shows that students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can develop abilities and skills associated with self-determination (e.g., decision making, problem solving, goal setting and attainment) when opportunities and supports are provided, students with ASD tend to show lower levels of self-determination compared to their peers without disabilities or with other disabilities. Researchers have suggested that common ASD characteristics may influence the development and expression of self-determination and that there may be less focus on self-determination and its development in ASD. Therefore, the aim of this review was to investigate existing studies that examined factors impacting the development of self-determination for students with ASD or implemented self-determination interventions with students with ASD. We reviewed existing empirical studies related to self-determination and students with ASD published in peer-reviewed journals. We examined the thematic categories of research studies, rigor of research, and influential factors. Among the 18 included studies, three distinct thematic categories were identified: (a) intervention research, (b) stakeholders’ perceptions, and (c) contextual analysis. Intervention articles were the most prevalent, followed by articles that reported stakeholders’ perceptions. Contextual analysis articles were less common. Several factors have been identified that influence student self-determination (e.g. age, gender, hours spent with peers, educational placement). This review suggests that self-determination of students with ASD can be promoted through instructional methods, and there are personal and environmental factors that are important to consider when supporting the self-determination of students with ASD. However, there is a need for enhanced rigor of research in future studies.

Inspired by William J. Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged, hundreds of studies have focused on the detrimental effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods. Consequently, far less is known about the contextual effects of advantaged neighborhoods, and what is known does not take into consideration long-term exposure. The present study extends research on advantaged neighborhoods by examining how respondents' neighborhood contexts across their entire childhoods influence adult educational attainment. Findings indicate that structural effects in advantaged neighborhoods influence residents' educational attainment-especially for White residents. Results suggest that addressing the issues associated with the truly disadvantaged requires examining the compounding privilege of the truly advantaged.

This paper seeks to return scholarly attention to a core intellectual divide between segmented and conventional (or neo-) assimilation approaches, doing so through a theoretical and empirical reconsideration of contextual effects on second-generation outcomes. We evaluate multiple approaches to measuring receiving country contextual effects and measuring their impact on the educational attainment of the children of immigrants. We demonstrate that our proposed measures better predict second-generation educational attainment than prevailing approaches, enabling a multilevel modeling strategy that accounts for the structure of immigrant families nested within different receiving contexts.

We contribute to research on social inequalities in educational attainment by examining the role of institutional contexts for students’ study abroad (SA) intent and participation. To do so, we extend the individual-level rational choice model predicting SA intent and participation depending on students’ socioeconomic status (SES) into a multi-level model emphasizing the importance of context effects. We test our model based on unique micro-level student data, which we supplement with context data. Examining 18,510 students nested in 69 universities, we provide the first in-depth multi-level analyses of SA intent and participation of students from Japan. In line with findings from many Western countries, our results show that higher-SES students are more likely to (intend to) study abroad. Regarding the role of institutional contexts, we find that programs designed to improve SA opportunity structures hardly affect students’ SA intent but significantly positively affect SA participation above and beyond other university-level and student-level characteristics. Importantly, both lower- and higher-SES students benefit from favorable SA opportunity structures. These findings suggest that Japan’s recent push toward internationalization of higher education has created relevant SA opportunities for students from different social backgrounds. Still, higher-SES students are currently overrepresented among those studying abroad because they are more likely to select into universities offering favorable SA opportunity structures. Our analysis calls for more research combining individual-level with contextual-level theories and data to better understand the conditions shaping SES-specific SA intent and participation.

This paper analyses whether a multi-scale representation of geographical context based on statistical aggregates computed for individualised neighbourhoods can lead to improved estimates of neighbourhood effect. Our study group consists of individuals born in 1980 that have lived in Sweden since 1995 and we analyse the effect of neighbourhood context at age 15 on educational outcome at age 30 controlling for parental background. A new piece of software, Equipop, was used to compute the socio-economic composition of neighbourhoods centred on individual residential locations and ranging in scale from including the nearest 12 to the nearest 25,600 neighbours. Our results indicate that context measures based on fixed geographical sub-divisions can lead to an underestimation of neighbourhood effects. A multi-scalar representation of geographical context also makes it easier to estimate how neighbourhood effects vary across different demographic groups. This indicates that scale-sensitive measures of geographical context could help to re-invigorate the neighbourhood effects literature.

There is a social gradient to the determinants of health; low socioeconomic status (SES) has been linked to reduced educational attainment and employment prospects, which in turn affect physical and mental wellbeing. One goal of preventive interventions, such as parenting programs, is to reduce these health inequalities by supporting families with difficulties that are often patterned by SES. Despite these intentions, a recent individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis of the Incredible Years (IY) parenting program found no evidence for differential benefit by socioeconomic disadvantage (Gardner et al. in Public Health Resesearch 5, 1–144, 2017). However, it did not examine whether this was influenced by engagement in the intervention. Using intervention arm data from this pooled dataset (13 trials; N = 1078), we examined whether there was an SES gradient to intervention attendance (an indicator of engagement). We ran mixed-effects Poisson regression models to estimate incidence rate ratios (IRRs) for program attendance for each of five (binary) markers of SES: low income; unemployment; low education status; teen parent; and lone parent status. The multilevel structure of the data allowed for comparison of within-trial and between-trial effects, including tests for contextual effects. We found evidence that low SES was associated with reduced attendance at parenting programs—an 8–19% reduction depending on the SES marker. However, there was no evidence that this association is impacted by differences in SES composition between trials or by the attendance levels of higher-SES families. The findings underscore the importance of developing and prioritizing strategies that enable engagement in parenting interventions and encourage program attendance by low-SES families.

In French cities, because of a rigid school catchment area policy based on students’ place of residence, there is a strong correlation between socio-residential segregation and school segregation. But the latter is not merely a simple, mechanical reflection of the former. Many processes (the choice of private schools or of specific and very often selective and rare curricula that make it possible to avoid the local public middle school; disability; siblings; personal convenience) contribute to exacerbating the correlation. Using data from the Ministry of Education, the current paper develops a typology of middle schools according to their socio-economic composition (using Correspondence Analysis and Hierarchical Agglomerative Classification), and looks at their unequal spatial distribution across the Paris metropolitan area. We measure school segregation using classical indices, and show that school segregation is higher than socio-residential segregation, particularly for students from upper-middle class backgrounds and for students from working class backgrounds. The spatial analysis of segregation, when compared with test scores, reveals strong inequalities between locations. The impact of school segregation on school success has been mainly analysed in terms of the effect of students’ social background. If one looks at the number of top tier marks (‘mention bien et très bien’) obtained at the final middle school exam in the Paris metropolitan area from 2006 to 2012, it is possible to see that girls and boys are not equally sensitive to these contextual effects. Based on logistic regressions, the analysis of the interactions between individual characteristics (socio-economic background and gender) and contextual variables (the school’s status [private/public], its location, its socio-economic composition) gives a more complex picture. This raises both methodological and political questions that suggest the need for an intersectional approach. Such a finding presents a challenge not only for social scientists studying segregation and school inequalities, but also for policy makers who want to reinforce mixed schooling. 在法国城市，由于基于学生居住地的严格的学区政策，社会居住隔离与学校隔离之间存在很强的相关性。但后者不仅仅是对前者的简单机械反映。许多过程加剧了相关性，例如对私立学校的选择，或对特定的、通常是选择性和稀有的课程的选择（这使得家长有可能避开当地公立中学）；残疾；兄弟姐妹；个人便利等。利用教育部的数据，本文根据社会经济构成（使用对应分析和分层集聚分类）开发中学分类，并研究了它们在整个巴黎大都市区的不平等空间分布。我们使用经典指数来衡量学校隔离，并表明学校隔离高于社会居住隔离，特别是在来自中上阶层背景的学生和来自工人阶级背景的学生之间的隔离。与测试分数相比，隔离的空间分析揭示了地点之间的强烈不平等。学校隔离对学校成功的影响主要从学生社会背景的影响进行分析。如果看一下2006年到2012年期间巴黎大都会区中学毕业考试的那些最高分数（“mention bien et tre’s bien”），就有可能看到女孩和男孩对这些背景效应敏感程度不一样。基于逻辑回归，对个体特征（社会经济背景和性别）与背景变量（学校的地位[私立/公立]、其位置、社会经济构成）之间的相互作用的分析给出了更复杂的图景。这提出了方法论和政治问题，表明需要采用交叉方法。这一发现不仅对研究种族隔离和学校不平等的社会科学家提出了挑战，也对那些希望加强混合教育的政策制定者提出了挑战。