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Research has studied less the embeddedness of the relationship between parental educational expectations and teacher judgments in the neighborhood. We use data that were collected in a longitudinal study conducted in Belgium, which focused on children in the fifth and sixth grades of primary school. We found that the effect of neighborhood on teacher judgments is mediated by the nonnative background of students. The effect of neighborhood seems to be mainly one of selecting pupils in the school. Teachers have--under control of deductive ability and previous teacher judgments--a lower judgment of students with an immigrant background.

Purpose: There is a tendency to assess educational systems in terms of their efficiency in gaining high scores on cognitive skills. Schools perform, however, also a socializing function. The whole policy debate tends to ignore the impact of educational systems on attitudes or democratic values. This contribution focuses on the impact of the organization of education in European societies on the civic attitudes of adolescents. Design/methodology/approach: We explore the impact of academic segregation--the practice of segregating children on the basis of their scholastic achievement--on attitudes of adolescents living in different educational systems. We use the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (2009) relying on multilevel models. Findings: Pupils differ in their outlook on fellow citizens, according to the ways in which educational systems select and differentiate throughout school careers. More specifically, there is a negative impact of academic segregation on the attitudes towards immigrants and ethnic minorities. Research limitations/implications: The experience of adolescents based on their educational achievement seems to affect how they perceive other people. We have not answered the question why this is the case. We hope to have provided a minimal indication of the impact of inequality on social outcomes.

Scholars have consistently demonstrated that the socioeconomic composition of the pupil body is related to academic achievement. The effect of ethnic/immigrant concentration, on the other hand, is more controversial, as some have found no impact of the ethnic/immigrant composition when other aspects were taken into account. Social capital theory claims that it is possible to compensate for a disadvantaged background or school composition when pupils benefit from being integrated in specific social structures. This article tests whether social capital is positively related to the mathematics achievement of pupils in the fourth and fifth grades of Flemish primary schools in which most of the pupils have a low socioeconomic and/or an ethnic/immigrant background (i.e. segregated schools).

A body of scholarly work has emerged on educational expectations. More recently, the relationship between educational expectations and immigrant background in Western Europe has been investigated. Although the results of this type of inquiry show that students with an immigrant background tend to have higher educational expectations, potential explanations of this relationship remain unarticulated. In this article, we investigate whether religious affiliation and practice help explain the relationship between immigrant background and educational expectations. We use the Flemish survey data from the 2009 wave of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS). In comparison with students who claimed to have no religious affiliation, students with a Muslim and other religious affiliation were more likely to have these expectations. This relation does not hold for the students with a Christian religious affiliation. However, the effect of religious affiliation disappears when the effects of religious participation were included. We also found that the more religiously active, the higher the educational expectations are for the students. This effect diminished when we controlled for talking with parents about political or social issues. The relationship between immigrant background and educational expectations is partially explained by the level of religious practice and religious affiliation of students.

In this article, we explore the relationship between parental literacy activities with the child, socio-economic status (SES) and reading literacy. We draw upon the Bourdieusian theory of habitus development to explore this relationship. Multilevel analyses of a survey of 43,870 pupils (with an average age of 10 years) in 10 Western European regions reveal a positive relation between early parental involvement in literacy activities (before primary school) and an increasing level of reading literacy and parental education. Students with a lower SES also have lower reading literacy and reading attitudes than students with a higher SES. We also find that children with a lower SES experience more late parental involvement in literacy activities (during the fourth year of formal schooling) than children with a higher SES. We also show that late parental involvement in literacy activities is an adjustment for worse or better reading literacy during primary school.

During the past decade, both qualitative and quantitative research have documented strong feelings of fatalism amongst pupils enrolled in technical and vocational tracks in secondary education. Whereas those feelings have been shown to predict decreased school involvement and school misconduct, relatively little is known about their exact origins. In this paper, we explore to what extent they should be considered a stigma consciousness caused by the demeaning impact of perceived contempt to which pupils from technical and vocational tracks are exposed. Data from the "International Civic and Citizenship Education Study" from Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, N: 1967) were used to explore the distribution and consequences of perceived contempt with regard to one's choice of study. About 20% of the pupils enrolled in technical and vocational education reported that some people looked down on them due to their studies. Moreover, even after taking into account different ability measures and social background characteristics, a strong direct relationship remained between perceived contempt and feelings of futility. In the conclusion, we elaborate on the implications of our findings.

This study examines the impact of socio-economic status and gender on computer ownership and the computer profile of 518 pupils in Dutch-speaking secondary education in Brussels (Belgium). Computer profile is introduced as a concept gauging computer experience, intensity of computer use and beliefs towards computers. Results indicate that socio-economic status affects computer ownership only moderately. The effect of socio-economic status on the computer profile variables is entirely mediated through the educational track: pupils in vocational education (on average from a lower socio-economic background) reported a more negative computer profile. The effect of gender on the computer profile was much more pronounced: girls reported less experience with computers, a lower degree of home and school use of computers, and less favourable beliefs towards computers in general. However, girls do not seem to differ from boys concerning study-related computer beliefs. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)

A fundamental question in the comparative sociology of religion is: What are the drivers of cross-national differences in religiosity? The existential insecurity argument raises the expectation of higher levels of religiosity in contexts of social crisis. We test this argument against countries' armed conflict experiences, employing global longitudinal data on religious adherence over almost half a century. We did not find evidence of religious revival when measuring the consequences of armed conflict with a 5-year lag, indicating that armed conflict-related social crises do not tend to lead to sudden changes in the religious adherence of a country. However, we did find more consistent indications of a higher proportion of religious people when using accumulated measurements of armed conflict, highlighting the importance of investigating the armed conflict history of a country when assessing its religious consequences. Our results show that countries with a more devastating experience of armed conflict tend to present higher proportions of religious adherence in comparison with countries with a less devastating armed conflict history. We concluded that armed conflict tends to partially drive religious persistence in societies that have experienced it, and that the pace at which this takes place is gradual rather than immediate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Belgium, since the first instances of girls wearing headscarves in schools in 1989, the public discussion on the place of Islam and Muslims in Belgian society has been almost constant. That debate has become more polarized in the wake of the attacks of 22 March 2016. The results presented in this paper are drawn from sixteen group discussions and twenty individual semi-structured interviews. We investigate the weight of discrimination processes on identity formation in the light of both reactive religiosity and individualization and secularization theoretical frameworks. Our data show that strongly identifying as Muslim is not experienced as being exclusive of other types of identifications claimed simultaneously. Then, we illustrate the processes of reflexivity, appropriation, and individualization of belief, as well as the negotiation or even circumvention of certain religious norms that are ongoing among Brussels' Muslim youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has studied less the embeddedness of the relationship between parental educational expectations and teacher judgments in the neighborhood. We use data that were collected in a longitudinal study conducted in Belgium, which focused on children in the fifth and sixth grades of primary school. We found that the effect of neighborhood on teacher judgments is mediated by the nonnative background of students. The effect of neighborhood seems to be mainly one of selecting pupils in the school. Teachers have—under control of deductive ability and previous teacher judgments—a lower judgment of students with an immigrant background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A body of scholarly work has emerged on educational expectations. More recently, the relationship between educational expectations and immigrant background in Western Europe has been investigated. Although the results of this type of inquiry show that students with an immigrant background tend to have higher educational expectations, potential explanations of this relationship remain unarticulated. In this article, we investigate whether religious affiliation and practice help explain the relationship between immigrant background and educational expectations. We use the Flemish survey data from the 2009 wave of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS). In comparison with students who claimed to have no religious affiliation, students with a Muslim and other religious affiliation were more likely to have these expectations. This relation does not hold for the students with a Christian religious affiliation. However, the effect of religious affiliation disappears when the effects of religious participation were included. We also found that the more religiously active, the higher the educational expectations are for the students. This effect diminished when we controlled for talking with parents about political or social issues. The relationship between immigrant background and educational expectations is partially explained by the level of religious practice and religious affiliation of students. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]