Students with migrant background and merit: a challenge for an inclusive school

Abstract

The relationship between merit and scholastic inclusion is particularly complex for those students at risk of dropping out of school, with particular evidence, for Italy, in the case of students with foreign citizenship (about 11% of the entire stu-dent population in the year.s. 2021/22). These are generally pupils with a low socio-economic, cultural, and family background (Ismu, 2022), and for whom there is a significant gap in standardized reading, mathematics and science test scores (Ferri et al., 2023) and for whom furthermore the risk of dispersion is sig-nificantly higher than that of their native peers (Inapp 2022). This paper aims to explore the factors that condition educational poverty gaps from a psychosocial perspective, with empirical evidence from the PISA 2018 datasets read considering the most recent docimological literature (Corsini, 2023).