ERIC Number: EJ1295503
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021
Pages: 25
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: EISSN-2196-0739
EISSN: N/A
Classroom, Media and Church: Explaining the Achievement Differences in Civic Knowledge in the Bilingual School System of Estonia
Põder, Kaire; Lauri, Triin
Large-scale Assessments in Education, v9 Article 3 2021
This study investigates civic and citizenship education in a unique post-Communist context--in the bilingual education system of Estonia. Estonia continues to have a bilingual school system where there are Estonian and Russian language schools in parallel. While Estonian language school students are ranked very high in international comparisons, there is a significant difference between the achievement of Estonian and Russian language school students. We claim that this minority achievement gap in the performance of civic and citizenship knowledge is in addition to family background characteristics explained by behavioral and attitudinal factors that are moderated by the school language. Behavioral and attitudinal independent variables that we consider relevant in our analysis are classroom climate, trust in various media channels, and students' beliefs in the influence of religion. We rely on hierarchical modeling to capture the embedded data and aim to explain how the different layers (school- and student level) interact and impact civic knowledge. We show that an open classroom is beneficial to students and part of the gap can be explained by Russian school students' lower involvement in such practices. The strength of the belief in the influence of religion, on the contrary, is hurting students, despite that the negative effect is smaller for minority students there is a higher aggregate negative effect of it and therefore it also contributes to the minority achievement gap. Media trust indicators explain the gap marginally while the high trust of social media hurts students' civic knowledge scores--still more Russian school students trust social media more than Estonian school students.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Citizenship Education, Civics, Bilingual Education, Achievement Gap, Family Characteristics, Attitudes, Behavior, Beliefs, Religion, Classroom Environment, Mass Media, Language Usage, Minority Group Students, Trust (Psychology), Social Media, Finno Ugric Languages, Russian
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Estonia
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A