Chapter 3. Primary School Skill Development: from First to Sixth Grade 3.5.3 The sixth-grade achievement gap There are significant achievement gaps in students’ skills by the end of first grade (as detailed in Table B.9). Consistent with prior literature, outlined in Section 3.2, students with highly educated parents outperform their peers in all skill areas. In addition, male students have stronger math skills, while female students excel in language (reading and spelling) skills. The appendix also shows a notable native-migrant achievement gap, with native students outperforming peers with a migration background. Given the strong connection between first- and sixth-grade skill levels, we examine how much of the sixth-grade achievement gap can be traced back to the outset of primary education. Table 3.5 presents the findings for reading, spelling, and math across three separate panels. The first row of each panel shows the achievement gap in sixth grade. Students with low-educated parents score significantly lower on reading (-0.14 SD), spelling (-0.05 SD), and math (-0.10 SD) compared to their peers with middle-educated parents, respectively. In contrast, students with high-educated parents score higher on all domains compared to their peers. This achievement gap regarding parental education seems to be largest for reading (0.60 SD) and smallest for spelling (0.30 SD). For achievement differences between male and female students, we find that female students perform better in language skills (0.24 SD for reading and 0.05 SD for spelling) than male students, whereas male students perform 0.27 SD better in math than their female peers. Last, we inspect the native-migrant achievement gap. At the end of primary education, Western migrant students outperform their native peers in all subjects. Non-Western 66
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