Abstract

In recent years the analysis of educational outcomes has become increasingly important due mainly to the importance of success at school and the role of the modern school, where students are trained on how to make inroads and work towards planning their lives. In keeping with law no 144/1999, the Province of Bologna local authority collects data on student individuals of compulsory schooling age. This survey represents a complete coverage of the territory. The aim of this study is to use the data on individuals to explain the educational outcomes of these students. We have analysed the data on 5,944 students who were born in 1988 and who attended secondary schools in the province of Bologna in one or more of the five school years from 2002/03 to 2006/07. At first we calculated the success probabilities by gender and institute; later, in order to determine and quantify the influence of students' individual characteristics on final outcomes we estimated five logistic regressions, one for each school year and class attended. Our models confirm the exploratory analysis: variables such as gender, citizenship and the type of school attended do affect educational outcomes.