Family-related factors, like family’s socio-economic status and parental expectations towards the child, have a significant impact on students’ educational outcomes (Harju-Luukkainen & Vettenranta, 2014; Yamamoto & Holloway, 2010; Christenson, 2004; Fantuzzo, Tighe & Childs, 2000; Siraj-Blatchford, 2010). According to many international assessments, high parental expectations towards their child seem to be especially important in this respect (Yamamoto & Holloway, 2010), while socio-economic factors have a positive, though lesser effect on the results. This study investigates the relationship between family-related factors and students’ academic achievement in the light of the Finnish data collected for Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015. Our analysis is focused on fourth graders and their mathematics and science performance in Finland in both Swedish-speaking and Finnish-speaking language groups. Finland has two national languages, Finnish and Swedish. The Swedish –speakers are in minority, constituting approximately 5.4 per cent of the whole population in Finland, while the vast majority of the population (c. 90.4 per cent) are registered as Finnish-speakers SVT, 2013). Due to the constitutional status of these two national languages, Finland has a school system of two ”parallel” sectors: the Finnish- and the Swedish-language one. These schools are run side by side with almost identical curricula and similar resources. This means, that in theory, both the Swedish-speaking students and their Finnish-speaking peers have equal educational opportunities at all education levels, from kindergartens up to universities. From these premises we have formulated a research question: Are there statistically significant differences between the family related background variables in these two language groups and further is their effect on the educational outcome in mathematics and science similarly significant? The results indicate that family-related background factors have different effects on student achievement in mathematics and in science in the different language groups. This raises a question why in some student groups the effect of family related background variables seems to have a larger impact than in others (see also OECD, 2016).

This paper draws on the TIMSS 2015 data for fourth-graders in Finland. The data comprises 158 schools and 5251 students in total. Of these Finnish speaking students were 4784 and Swedish-speaking 231. TIMSS is an international assessment of mathematics and science at the fourth and eighth grades. The first TIMSS assessment took place in 1995 and the program has continued with subsequent rounds every four years since then. Approximately 70 countries were involved in TIMSS 2015, which makes it one of the largest international assessments in the world. TIMSS is conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which is an independent international cooperative of national research institutions and government agencies doing cross-national achievement studies. The assessment yields information not only about students’ overall achievement, backgrounds and attitudes toward mathematics and science but also about their teachers’ education and training, classroom characteristics and activities, and school contexts for learning and instruction in mathematics and science. Therefore, TIMSS 2015 assessment employed questionnaires for students’ as well as for parents, schools and teachers, respectively. In the initial analyses, we chose variables from the questionnaire to both parents and students. Those variables were chosen into the further analysis that were family related. These variables were then analysed with the help of two-stage regression model.

In the initial analyses we could find differences between the different language groups in Finland. In the Finnish-speaking student group all of the family related background variables were statistically significant when it comes to the students educational outcome in mathematics and science. In the Swedish-language groups only one of the studied family related variables had a significant impact on students educational outcome.

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