Portugal has been participating in PISA since 2000. This international programme created by the OECD, aims at evaluating education systems of the participating countries by the assessment of the skills and knowledge of 15 year old students, in a triennial basis. The survey includes three different domains: reading, mathematics, and science literacy, The results so far available in the PISA survey allow comparisons between students of participating countries and also provide an understanding of the importance of several relevant factors such as gender, socio-economic background, type of school (public/private), region, among others, as factors of their performance.

The results from PISA 2009 showed that in Portugal more than 35% of students were resilient. Students are called resilient when they reach high performance standards under poor socio-economic circumstances, that is to say, they perform against the odds. The identification of the individual and school factors underlying these examples of success is of paramount importance. In fact, understanding why these students have such high levels of performance in reading literacy can simultaneously reveal good practices – at home and school – and also shed light on causes of student failure. The importance of resilient students it that they prove that there is in the education system – at individual, family and school levels – the ability to mitigate or even eliminate the impact of socio-economic context.

According to OECD, resilient students are those who “[...] come from disadvantaged backgrounds yet exhibit high levels of school success” (OECD, 2011a). OECD in this study Against the Odds: Disadvantaged Students Who Succeed in School (OECD, 2011a), presents two definitions to identify resilient students: one for intra-country analysis and another for comparisons among countries. Both definitions are supported in two indicators: the Index of Economic, Social and Cultural Status and the performance score achieved by the student (especially in reading literacy, the major domain in PISA 2009). Taking into reference the definition that includes the intra-country analysis, resilient students are the ones that fall within both the first tertile (below the 33^th percentile) of their country ESCS and the last tertile (above the 67^th percentile) of the distribution range of the reading performance in their country.

This research focus on the analysis of schools with disadvantaged socio-economic background that have promoted successful students in reading literacy. The research questions to be responded in the framework of this work are:

• What is the moderating role of the school in the compensation of adverse socio-economic and cultural context to student success?

• Which school characteristics promote successful students, particularly those with low socio-economic and cultural status?

• What is the mediating role of study practices and reading strategies developed by students with low socio-economic and cultural status which make them resilient students?

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