Family related variables effect on later educational outcome: a further geospatial analysis on TIMSS 2015 Finland

Abstract

Family-related factors, like parent’s educational level, their values and expectations have a significant impact on child’s early skills and later educational outcomes. Further, parents provide their child, alongside with other learning environments, a broad mathematical and early literacy input. This study investigates the relationship between family-related socio-economic and other factors like, parental education, amount of books at home, parental attitudes towards mathematics and science, parental perception of child’s early skills and student’s later academic achievement. This is studied in the light of the Finnish data collected for Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015. The results are presented with the help of a geospatial method called Kriging that reveals regional variance. The results indicate that family-related background variables have different effects on child’s later achievement in mathematics across Finland. The results suggest, that some areas in Finland are better in ‘levelling the playing field’ for children and minimising the effect of family related variables on educational outcomes than others.