Beyond expectations: how much does the structure of european education systems affects students’ performance?

Educational systems at the upper secondary level in European countries are highly differentiated. It is therefore reasonable to consider that the var-ying internal organization of these systems has national-level effects on both equity and proficiency, elements that directly affect students. In our work, using an approach aimed at observing the underlying social mecha-nisms (Coleman’s boat), we aim to examine the action/interaction be-tween micro and macro phenomena. This will be conducted on a sample of 32 countries described in the Eurydice 2023 report. Building on the work of Benadusi and Giancola (2014), we have recreated a differentiation in-dex to achieve this objective and observe changes over time in educa-tional systems. The ultimate goal of the study was to determine whether the structure of educational systems contributes to the creation of stu-dents who exceed performance expectations, specifically if these are re-lated to the presence of students performing better or worse than pre-dicted by their socio-economic and cultural status, i.e., deviant students (Bonanni & Moreschini, 2024).