Abstracts - Earli

Value added in first grade of primary school: Does it differ between schools with highconcentrations of socially disadvantaged children?Jan Van Damme, Catholic University Leuven, BelgiumJean Pierre Verhaeghe, Catholic University Leuven, BelgiumThis study investigates to which degree group composition with regard to social and ethnicculturalbackground affects first grade pupils’ learning in mathematics, reading fluency andspelling. Using data from an ongoing large longitudinal study, we focus on the diversity in valueadded scores among schools with similarly high proportions of socially disadvantaged or ethnicminority children, comparing with the diversity among ‘white middle-class’ schools. Results ofmultilevel analyses reveal significant but only small group composition effects related to schoolaverage SES and proportions of non-Dutch speaking pupils in first grade. No interaction effectswith individual pupil characteristics were found. Having schools clustered in four types accordingto the proportions of pupils in first grade from different SES-levels and home language, it wasfound that the within-type-of-school diversity in value added is much larger than differencesbetween "types" of schools. Many low SES schools even generate value added scores that equal oroutperform many white middle-class schools. That is observed in all three learning domains, butappeared to be particularly the case in the domain of mathematics. These findings have to berelated to the findings with respect to the impact of social background at the individual studentlevel, which – over and above prior achievement and other influential factors – is not very largeeither. The results of our analyses questions the widely spread belief – also prominent within theethnic minority communities – that schools with high concentrations of socially deprived and/orethnic minority children by definition yield less quality.E 2129 August 2007 14:30 - 16:30Room: 0.65SymposiumInternational perspectives on mathematics teaching and lessonstructureChair: Yoshinori Shimizu, University of Tsukuba, JapanOrganiser: David Clarke, University of Melbourne, AustraliaDiscussant: Yoshinori Shimizu, University of Tsukuba, JapanAmong the many virtues of international comparative research is the capacity to provide insightthrough extreme contrast. Each of the four papers that comprise this symposium adopts a distinctanalytical approach to the analysis of teaching and lesson structure in mathematics classrooms.Each paper’s analysis offers a distinctive view of the collaborative construction of classroompractice by the participants. Each analysis illuminates the process by which instructional norms ofpractice were established in each setting. Among the issues discussed is the question of whetherthe teacher and students’ goals can be thought of as at all in harmony or are more likely to be inconflict. In the second study, having distinguished Swedish classrooms from US and Australianclassrooms with respect to student-initiated repair activities, an analysis of historical video footageis undertaken to investigate the evolution of this distinctive practice. The third study addresses thechallenge of finding a legitimate unit for international comparisons of lesson structure and the– 306 –