Jaap Dronkers was the first to include countries of origin into analysis of the “immigrant gap” in the large cross-country educational tests (Dronkers and Fleischmann 2010; Levels and Dronkers 2008; Levels, Dronkers and Kraaykamp 2008). By running a set of multilevel models he comes to a conclusion that all three effects play a certain role: though the family effect (background characteristics) has the biggest explanatory power, the effects of origin and destination also matter (Levels and Dronkers 2008:1422). At the same time he leaves the explanation of this finding for the future scrutiny. Michael Minkov (2008) gives an important clue on importance of considering values in attempts to explain the differences on the country level. Building upon a tradition of texts that deals with the notion of long-term orientation values on individual (Heine 2001) and ecological (Hofstede 2001) level and taking the World Values Survey as the data source he creates a monumentalism index. This index is a combination of two conceptual scales: self-enhancement versus self-effacement and self-stability versus self-flexibility (Minkov 2008:183). According to his estimations (Minkov 2008:187), while controlled for the GDP and the PPP, the monumentalism rate is strongly and negatively correlated with TIMSS both math and science results of all years. The proposed research builds upon these two efforts and attempts to answer the basic research questions: Do predictors that lie in the realm of values able to explain variance in the gap between educational results of natives and different groups of migrants? Is the Monumentalism index capable of explaining the gap? Are there other value-predictors applicable for explaining gaps?

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