# Research projects

## Project CEMAPRE internal

 Title Implications of poverty and social exclusion on students grade retention $-$ a multilevel modelling approach. Participants Amélia Bastos (Principal Investigator), Maria Eugénia Ferrão Summary Multilevel models offer social science scientists a unique approach to the understanding of individual, contextual and interaction factors implications on a given outcome variable. The association between education and poverty or social exclusion is well documented in the literature. It is also well known that there are substantial school variations in educational outcomes and that compositional school effect influences the student performance, and therefore educational success. Specifically, we are interested in the understanding of the relationship between grade retention and students characteristics such as poverty or social exclusion status, gender, age, family sociodemographic and economic background, and childrens living conditions in terms of health, housing, social inclusion. In this project we use primary microdata collected in a Portuguese municipality. Our aim is twofold: we examine the main factors associated with students grade retention (assessed by students 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.