Declining achievement levels among students in Sweden in several core subjects has led to a debate concerning strategies for improving student achievement. A significant amount of research has been conducted in Sweden regarding students' performance, and these studies have looked at factors that influence students' success at different levels of the educational system, also from different perspectives. The link between students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and academic achievement is well established (see e.g., Swedish National Agency for Education 2009). However, OECD (2013) emphasize that education can make a difference based on observations that there are countries that manage to narrow the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students while simultaneously improving overall performance. Unfortunately Sweden is not among these countries. Instead, Sweden is one of the countries that exhibit losses over the years, both in performance and in equity level. Results from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2012 assessment, show that Swedish students performed below the OECD mean in all three subjects (OECD 2013). The overall performance of other Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Norway is also below the international average achievement. However, Finland, contrary to the other Nordic countries, is among the top performing countries.

Results also revealed that there are significant differences between schools with reference to students’ performance. The school segregation, previously considered as keen to counter, rather have become increasingly prominent in Sweden in recent years (Swedish National Agency for Education 2012, OECD 2013). Davidsson et al. (2013) have analyzed performance in PISA science in several European countries and have concluded that countries with descending results also have increasing between-school variance, while countries with improving students’ performance have decreasing between-school variance. In this light, it is important also to explore factors of importance for students’ performance in other subjects and among different group of students. The aim of this study is to identify factors associated with students’ performance in PISA in mathematics at different performance levels in the Nordic countries.

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