“The influence of socio-economic-cultural background on academic results in the INVALSI tests of Italian and mathematics in two southern regions: Puglia and Abruzzo”

(ABSTRACT del contributo): If we examine the INVALSI data, there are many factors that influence school results and, among these, a central role is played by the socio-economic-cultural status (ESCS) of the student. The im-portance of this variable for understanding inequalities in education has always been a cornerstone of sociological analysis, in which various theories have been proposed (Besozzi, 2017). This issue has also been investigated in the context of school psychology, with reference to the "Social Justice" perspective (Shriberg et al 2020), which has made an important contribution to the definition of school policies. Some more recent contributions (Bagnarol and Donno 2020; Russo et al. 2020) examining the INVALSI English language test, have underlined the importance of investigating the relationship between social stratification and territorial gaps, focusing attention on the need to consider not only the differences on the North-South axis, but also those between individual regions or specific terri-tories. As Russo and colleagues (2020) note, the distance between central-northern and southern students is shorter for socially advantaged students (high ESCS level), while it widens when you go down the steps of social stratification. As Easterbrook & Hadden (2021) point out, we must take the local context seriously if we are to apply effective policies to reduce the effect of inequalities in education, and in particular the disad-vantage of minorities. A policy that works well in a local context, indeed, may not work as well in a different context. Hence, it is relevant to compare the different regions with respect to the analysis of the influence of socio-economic-cultural status on learning, and of the variables that are inter-twined with this influence. In line with previous surveys carried out on specific regions (eg. Martini, 2020b), the purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the ESCS on school results in the INVALSI tests of Ital-ian and mathematics in two southern regions, Puglia and Abruzzo, and to examine how this influ-ence is modified by a number of other variables: gender and origin of the student, delay in school and average ESCS of the class. The interest of this comparison is linked to the fact that these two regions have different GDP but the same relationship between GDP and learning outcomes; in particular, an average learning score that in both regions is slightly higher than what one might expect based on an estimate based on GDP (Martini 2020a).