A Model to Explain Italian Regional Differences in PISA 2009 Outcomes

The main aim of this paper is to propose a model, which can explain Italian regional variability in the PISA 2009 data. In the literature, many models have studied the impact on the PISA scores of individual variables, often related to gender, socio-economic status, and motivational factors. In some cases, other variables have been introduced to take account of particular school characteristics, such as the mean socio-economic level of the families of children attending a school, equipment and resource distribution, and so on. These approaches are largely inadequate to explain the variability among Italian regions. In fact, these regions exhibit many differences both in their labour market structures and in individual educational levels. This model is able to explain much of the region-to-region variability. The results pinpoint attention on the relationships between the labour market structure and the individual decisional processes, as well as on the quality of the educational system.