Research projects

Project CEMAPRE internal

TitleSTUDENTS GRADE RETENTION -- A MULTILEVEL MODELLING APPROACH
ParticipantsAmélia Bastos (Principal Investigator), Maria Eugénia Ferrão
SummaryIn this project we are interested in the understanding of the relationship between grade retention
and student's characteristics such as poverty or social exclusion status, gender, age, family
sociodemographic and economic background, and children's living conditions in terms of health,
housing, social inclusion.
We use primary microdata collected in a Portuguese municipality. Our aim is twofold: we examine the
main factors associated with student's grade retention (assessed by student's grade retention) and
we investigate the implications of poverty and social exclusion on the outcome variable under
analysis. The factors analyzed are grouped in two levels: schools (and compositional characteristics
of population served), and individual sociodemographic and economic attributes of the students in
these schools.
Disentangling the effects of these two sources of variation in school outcomes is important for the
debate of education public policy as well as for the design of poverty reduction policies.