Some students experiencing lack of some important factors such as a strong family structure, school allocations, high socio-economic status, safe living conditions, improved health conditions etc. are called disadvantaged. One of the most influential factors of being disadvantaged is socio-economic status, which is one of the strongest factors explaining change in student achievement (Guzel & Berberoglu, 2005; Kalender & Berberoglu, 2009),
Several mechanisms are built up by disadvantaged students that help them be able to handle the factors mentioned above. Students use some individual factors such as intelligence, temperament, internal locus of control, or autonomy to protect themselves and again to be able to put up with the problems they face (Beauvais & Oetting, 1999; Greene & Conrad, 2001). Although these mechanisms are (the) well-documented in the literature; most of them are hardly possible to be altered by external intervention. On the other hand, it is performable for a student to learn how to manage with the negative factors with the help of a teacher. It is of vital importance that disadvantaged students cope with such negative factors because doing so provide them with a good learning opportunity (Borman & Rachuba, 2001). Academic resilience is not only about the improvement of students’ achievement at school, but also about obtaining various positive outcomes in their lives such as stronger social relations, less emotional and behavioural problems, etc. Hanson and Austin (2003) reported that existing students who had a higher resiliency had higher achievement levels in schools.
Concerning with resilient students, student-teacher relations have a significant role in the way teachers treat that may have a positive impact on disadvantaged students and may increase student achievement. A report on PISA 2009 (OECD, 2009) stated that, although disadvantaged students need better access to teachers, they do not have to be best teachers. Instead, teachers’ practices in class can boot student learning and engagement (OECD, 2010).
Although today’s curriculum development philosophies put student on focus, the teacher seems to be the strongest predictor of student achievement in many countries including Turkey. Several researchers (Ceylan & Berberoglu, 2007; Yayan & Berberoglu, 2004) found that there was a significant correlation between teacher-related factors (attitude towards teacher, in-class practices by students, etc.) and student achievement. They also stated that student-centred approaches in class had negatively associated with achievement.
Mean rate of resilient students given by OECD is approximately 6% with a maximum of 13% for some countries such as Korea, Hong Kong-China (OECD, 2013). PISA 2012 results show that in addition to receiving lower scores in mathematics, disadvantaged students in terms of socio-economic status also received low scores from several dimensions such as engagement, drive, motivation and self-confidence.
As being among the first eight countries that had the highest ratios of resilient students among disadvantaged students Turkey as a developing country sets a good example to study resilient students, although Turkish students showed low performance on PISA from 2003 to 2012. In Turkey, Yilmaz and Findik (2012) showed that most of the disadvantaged students reached to 2nd level, while resilient students generally went up to 3rd level.
The significance of teacher-student relationships on differentiation on resilient and low-achieving students’ performance directed the researchers to investigate the importance levels of the factors mentioned above. Equivalency of factor loadings among groups may provide information related to attributions of groups to the latent variables. In other words, importance levels given for traits given by different groups can be defined (Lubke, Dolan, Kelderman & Mellenbergh, 2003). Significant differences between factor loadings across groups indicate that groups have different interpretations of traits. In this case, comparison of relationships among groups may not be possible.
