Abstracts - Earli

visual- auditory discrimination tests. The social abilities of children (social skills and externalizingbehavior) were measured with versions of the Social Skill Rating System (Gresham & Elliott,1990) and Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach, 1991) validated for our populations. Finally, theemotional skills of the subjects were evaluated with a test developed on basis of the Test ofEmotion Comprehension (TEC, Pons & Harris, 2000) and the Ontario Child Health Study. Parallelexperiments are currently been performed in Romania and in Cyprus, within a nationallyrepresentative sample of kindergartners. Preliminary results of this extensive study will bepresented at the EARLI conference.J 330 August 2007 17:00 - 18:20Room: 7.14Paper SessionComparative evaluationChair:Alex Kozulin, Int’l Center Enhancement of Learning Potential, IsraelSocial segregation in secondary schoolsStephen P. Jenkins, Institute for Social and Economic Research Univers, United KingdomJohn Micklewright, University of Southampton, United KingdomSylke V. Schnepf, University of Southampton, United KingdomNew evidence is provided about the degree of social segregation in 27 OECD countries using the2000 and 2003 rounds of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA). Samplingvariation is allowed for and various measures of social background are applied in order to testrobustness of results. England and the USA are shown to be middle-ranking countries. Severalcountries with separate school tracks for academic and vocation schooling - Austria, Germany andHungary - have relatively high social segregation and over half of this is accounted for byunevenness in social background between school tracks. Low segregation countries include thefour Nordic countries. The decomposition of segregation indices shows that in general unevennessin pupils’ social background between private and public schools has only a marginal impact oncountries’ level of segregation. Cross-country differences in segregation are associated with theprevalence of ability selection of pupils by schools.Why do non-cognitive variables predict more mathematics performance in some countries than inothers? A methodological study of PISA 2003Dominique Marie Lafontaine, University of Liege, BelgiumChristian Monseur, University of Liege, BelgiumIn 2003, mathematics performance of 15 year-olds has been measured in OECD countries byPISA. Besides cognitive achievement, several non-cognitive concepts have been measured: selfconcept,instrumental motivation, self-efficacy and anxiety towards mathematics. Accordinglywith the literature, those non-cognitive indices are moderately related to mathematics performance.But the percentages of variance explained by those indices at the student level strikingly varyacross countries. At first glance, it seems that the percentage of variance explained by the noncognitiveaspects is the highest in the most comprehensive education systems (the Nordic– 537 –