PISA (The Programme for International Student Assessment) measures 15-year-old students proficiency in three domains, mathematics, science and reading in some 65 participating countries. The assessment takes place in 3-year cycles and the results give us the opportunity to monitor changes in student achievement and other features. The focus in PISA 2000 and PISA 2009 was reading literacy and in turn in 2003 and in 2012 mathematics, when most of the testing time was devoted to this assessment area. Since the assessment measures same domains in three years cycles it also gives information over time.

Finland has seen a sharp growth in migration inflows since the early 2000s. Due to this, in PISA 2012 the immigrant students in Finland were oversampled for the first time to obtain dataset large enough for valid quantitative analyses. Before that the share of immigrant students in the Finnish PISA studies has followed their proportion in population (approximately 3 %). The Finnish PISA 2012 sample comprised 8829 Finnish students, 1270 of which with immigrant background.

Across OECD countries 11 % of the students assessed in PISA 2012 have an immigrant background. The composition of immigrant population is different in the European countries and also the immigration policies vary between countries. This means that immigrant populations can vary socio-economically, educationally or linguistically quite much from one country to another. In Finland the majority of the immigrants comes from Russia or from other immediate countries.

In PISA 2012 students with immigrant background performed poorly in mathematics in Finland. On average, in OECD countries students with immigrant background scored 34 points lower in mathematics than non-immigrant students did. In Finland this difference was 85 points and still 65 points, when the socio-economic status was controlled for. This is the largest gap of all Nordic countries and one of the largest among the OECD countries. In our study we try to illuminate this phenomenon further and highlight variables that might be of importance when explaining the results of Finnish students with immigrant background.

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