Poverty and School Achievement Poverty and School Achievement: an Additional Indicator for Socio-Economic Status

International large-scale achievement studies of student achievement employ different indicators to operationalize the socio-economic status (SES) of students. All the different SES variables correlate significantly to students ’ school achievement in all countries. ‘Poverty ’ as a theoretical construct in sociology has not up to now been included in international questionnaires for such studies, but it now has been included in the German extension of the TIMSS 2007 home questionnaire. This paper deals with the question whether students from families at risk of poverty perform worse in school than students whose families are not at a risk of poverty. Our analyses of data from TIMSS 2007 Germany show a significant relationship between families ’ risk of poverty and students ’ achievement in mathematics or science. To extract the additional effect of poverty relating to social disparity other indicators for the SES of the families were controlled. Our analyses show that in high-SES families the risk of poverty has a greater effect on students’ achievement than in low-SES families. We conclude that for in-depth analyses it is beneficial to use a combination of different indicators (e.g., highest level of education, occupational status, social resources, and risk of poverty) in order to consider various aspects of SES when analyzing social disparities in an educational context