Aspectos socioeconômicos e de vulnerabilidade do desempenho escolar: uma análise por indicadores regionais e de desempenho do aluno na educação básica

Abstract

Education has been constituted as one of the main assets of development in post-Industrial Revolution society. In the last two centuries, different fields of study have provided theories and predictive models in an attempt to understand aspects capable of producing and restraining educational performance. Social Sciences, Cognitive Psychology, and more recently Neuroscience have provided through ecological, behavioral, cognitive, and evolutionary theories, some of the predictors capable of evaluating how educational performance could be affected. In order to integrate these approaches, through socioeconomic indicators, this study aims to assess the multiple effect of vulnerabilities on educational performance. To analyze the results, we conducted two empirical studies representatives of the Brazilian territory. In the first, we adopt linear and regression tree regressions in assessing how sociodemographic indicators explain Mathematics and Portuguese Language performance in the 510 intermediate regions of the country. Among the results, it is discussed how health indicators explain a significant part of the parametric and nonparametric models adopted. The second study takes basic education students as the unit of analysis. This study measures the mathematics performance of 5th, 9th, and 3rd grade high school students using a significant sample (N = 5,398,001) of Brazilian students. Dozens of predictors assessing student, family, school, and city characteristics are assessed in this study. Cognitive, environmental, and developmental implications are discussed in the results assessing the effect of vulnerability and failure on academic performance in each of the years assessed. In the final part of the paper, epistemological and accessibility aspects of Brazilian education are discussed.