Exploring factors related with resilience in primary education: Evidence from European countries

Abstract This paper analyses factors associated with resilience in an educational context. In this framework, resilient students are those able to achieve excellent academic results despite their disadvantaged socioeconomic background. Over the last decade, this topic has generated a growing interest among researchers in the field of education economics. However, most efforts to date have focused on secondary education. By contrast, this study examines the main determinants of this phenomenon in primary education by exploiting the information available in the latest two waves of the TIMSS (2015) and PIRLS (2016) databases for all participating European countries (18). The results show that the skills learned by students before starting school and the socioeconomic status of their classmates are the factors that contribute most to stimulating the academic achievement of more socioeconomically disadvantaged students.