The prevalence of the social background as the main factor explaining educational success is well established, at least since the renowned Coleman report (1966). This has also been demonstrated in international and comparative studies, such as PISA, which shows that the social and economic background of the students is strongly associated with literacy performances. There are differences between countries but in general parent’s socioeconomic status is the main predictor of literacy results (OECD, 2010a).

Without denying this general picture, the authors of this paper argue that closing the scientific and political debate to the mentioned linear relations is not enough. Social reproduction processes do not allow the complete understanding of the factors than can promote successful educational trajectories and social mobility. In the case of students it is important to understand the role that school, families and the state can and should have in promoting equal opportunities of success. Our research is in line with others in the field of sociology of education, mainly developed in the 90ies that explicitly studied the (successful) exception (Feinstein and Vignoles, 2008; Lahire, 1995; Laurens, 1992). Other references are studies in the areas of education and psychology which adopted the construct of educational resilience (Luthar, Cicchetti, Becker, 2000; Rouse, 2001; Waxman, Padrón, Gray, 2004), referring to students who succeed in school despite the presence of adverse conditions (Waxman, Gray and Padron 2003). OECD itself has also produce reports with the goal of explaining this positive exception, using the concept of resilience. The best examples are the reports “Overcoming social Background” (OECD, 2010b), and “Against the Odds, Disadvantaged Students who Succeed in School ” (OECD, 2011).

Using different methodological strategies, our goal is to contribute to the advance of the research in the mentioned domain, comparing these exceptional ascendant cases in countries with different welfare states regimes (Esping-Andersen, 1990) educational systems (Martins, 2012), and reading performances (OECD, 2010a), such as Portugal, Finland and Germany. In each country we will compare resilient students with their disadvantaged peers across a set of socio-demographics factors: gender, cultural resources andeducational resources at home, educational level of parents and socio economic index of parents.

But to achieve a better understading of resilience we considered that it would be important to include other factors that may mediate the relationship between the mentioned socio-demographics factors and the likelihood of being a resilient student. We have thus hypothesized that although the direct effect of socio-demographic factors on the likelihood of being a resilient student, certain practices of reading and learning strategies, developed by students, may have mediation effects that increase the likelihood of disadvantaged students to beat the odds. To explore this hypothesis a multiple mediation model (Preacher, Hayes, 2008) with a set of parallel mediators (Hayes, 2012) will be tested for each selected European country.

We believe this research can contribute to the identification of the factors that might make a difference for successful educational trajectories, focusing not only in socio-demographic factors, but also in “alterable factors” (Waxman, Gray, Padron 2003).

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