Topic and Background:

This presentation explores spatial, or place-based, education challenges from a Norwegian context, more specifically focusing on rural issues. The main rationale for focusing on spatial inequalities in education in rural areas is that educational outcomes of students residing in rural areas are lower than for students residing elsewhere, which creates uneven opportunities for individuals depending on where they live. Empirical analyses of educational performance have often been dominated by individually centred approaches, focusing on variables such as gender, ethnicity or SES. Often lacking in education research has been contextual factors at municipal, county and national levels, as well as knowledge about interconnections between social and cultural resources as well as practices of schools (Bæck, 2015).

Objective and Research Questions:

This presentation explores how spatial factors have an effect on educational performance.

The main research questions are:

In what way does space affect educational performance among lower secondary students?

In what way does spatial factors affect gender differences in educational performance?

In what way does spatial factors affect social background differences in educational performance?

Disentangling the intricate interconnections between different variables playing out at different levels, demands concepts and constructs that enable us to grasp this complexity. The research field of place-based education disadvantage is in need of more theoretical discussions and advances that takes this into consideration (Corbett, 2015), and in this presentation I turn to insights from critical realism in order to explore a theoretical basis for a spatial analysis of this topic. This approach takes into consideration the actor-structure interplay in order to understand individual action and how societal structures work as causal factors in this regard (Archer, 2020; Bæck, 2022).

The analyses are based on register data for birth cohorts 1990-2004 from the National Education Data Base, Norway (NUDB). NUDB includes individual level education statistics since 1970. Measures of educational success are used as dependent variables, such as study points (points from compulsory education) and national tests in different subjects. Independent variables include gender, SES, parent’s educational background, geographic location and parent SES characteristics. In addition, the dataset from NUDB is expanded to include contextual variables connected to place of residence. The purpose is to enable contextualization through taking into account geographic, demographic, economic (including employment situation, rate of incidence of poverty, share of public education expenditure), ethnic, as well as other relevant social and cultural factors.

The study shows that spatial factors are essential in order to understand how individual characteristics affect educational performance. Space is intertwined with background factors such as SES and gender which plays out differently according to context.

Archer, M. S. (2020). The Morphogenetic Approach: Critical Realism’s Explanatory Framework Approach. In P. Róna & L. Zsolnai (Eds.), Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics. Virtues and Economics (pp. 137-150): Springer, Cham. Bæck, U.-D. K. (2022). Towards a critical realist ontology for spatial education analysis. In M. S. Archer, U.-D. K. Bæck, & T. Skinningsrud (Eds.), The Morphogenesis of the Norwegian Educational System. Emergence and Development from a Critical Realist Perspective (pp. 79-97): Routledge. Bæck, U.-D. K. (2015). Rural location and academic success. Remarks on research, contextualisation and methodology. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research. doi:10.1080/00313831.2015.1024163 Corbett, M. (2015). Rural Education: Some Sociological Provocations for the Field. Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, 25(3), 9-25.