Assessing Literacy Proficiency of Students with a Migratory Background: The Case of Lombardia Region
摘要
The inclusion of children of immigrants in the destination country schools is a topic of increasing importance in the international literature. In this paper, due to the possibility of using proficiency results in Italian language from the INVALSI (National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education and Training System) standardized tests carried out in 2022–2023, we focus on differences in performance by gender and migration background of students in grade 10 education (corresponding in Italy to the second year of upper secondary school). In this contribution, which is an initial exploratory approach to the topic, we restrain our attention on second-year secondary school students enrolled in Lombardy in the school year 2022–2023. Our analysis takes also into account the different types of secondary schools attended by students and the availability/accessibility of digital tools. We run an ANOVA model considering all possible interactions between the following variables: gender, school type, origin, ownership/availability of digital devices, and language predominantly spoken at home. Our findings indicate statistically different results for first-generation students compared to both natives and second-generation students. Conversely, it can be observed that being a native and having no devices is not significantly different (at 10%) from the condition of being a non-native and having no devices. Thus the results suggests that second generation status actually assimilates the behaviour of the latter to natives.