ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, the Finnish educational system has seen many changes. One major change has been the increasing number of students speaking languages other than the national languages: Finnish and Swedish. Given this societal change, in the PISA 2012 assessment students with an immigrant background in Finland were oversampled for the first time. The oversampling made it possible to gain more representative data on these students for further analyses. In this article the focus is on students’ mathematics performance and family background – more specifically, their economic, social and cultural status (ESCS) – in the metropolitan area of Finland. Regression analysis was conducted to study the effect of ESCS on mathematics performance in the area. In addition, a geostatistical method was used to see whether there was regional variation in these variables.
