Academic performance of peruvian elementary school children: The case of schools in LIMA at the 6 ^th grade

Education is in general the basis for de vel -opment in any country in the world. In the edu ca tion al field, several international assessments (Pisa, 2006) reflect the great gap that yet subsists among developing countries, in which the case of Peru is not an exception. There have been many national and inter -national academic achievement evaluations that examine the skills and knowledge of students not only in Peru but also in other Latin American countries in different academic domains. One of these examples is the Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (LLECE), in which Peru participat ed, in order to evaluate and compare the performance achieved by Latin American students of 3 ^rd and 6 ^th grade in core areas like Language, Mathematics, and Natural Sciences. Peru ranks, together with other Latin countries, with scores below the average (Regional Office for Education of UNESCO, 2008). The low ranking of the Peru -vian educational system carries heavy implications and consequences, especially to the intellectual and social development of learning disabled Pe -ruvian children. Understanding the relation between academic performance and child devel -opment is of paramount importance. The present study examines how spelling, reading and arithmetic performances are associat -ed to various child variables (gender, intelligence, and age), and distal variables such as Socio-Economic Status (SES) or type of school. The subjects in the study were 1.129 elementary school children who were in the 6 ^th grade (11 - 12 years old) in Metropolitan Lima, Perú. Children complet -ed four different tests: In the reading area, the subtest of Procesos Lectores (PROLEC-SE; Cuetos & Ramos, 1999), Reading of Word and Pseudo-word; in the Arithmetic domain, the Number Facil- ity from the Kit of Factor Referenc -ed Cognitive Tests of Ekstrom, French, and Harman (1979) and in the spelling domain, the Spelling Achievement Test from Dio ses (2001) was used. The Intelli gence Quotient (IQ) was measured using Raven's Progressive Matrices Test (Raven, J., Raven, J.C., & Court, 2004, updated edition). Some preliminary analyses were conducted beforehand in order to overview and examine the structure of the data. Following this, and because of the hierarchical structure of the data (students within classes within schools) multilevel analyses were conducted. Results showed, first and foremost, a great impact of (a) type of school, private schools performed better than in the public sector; (b) intelligence, another essential variable (the higher the IQ the better the academic achieve -ment), and partially of (c) gender, girls showed prevalence over boys in spelling. Likewise, we did not encounter any significant results of socioeconomic status in the multilevel analysis. Based on these results, some practical and pedagogical implications were discussed, such as the funda -mental effort to bring the lower achievement group into average levels of learning with remedial work, otherwise these students will lack the requisite skills needed to fulfill their secondary school academic expectations. Notwithstanding, we have to point out some limitations such as the lack of data from rural zones that could prevent us from comparisons between rural and urban zones. Fu -ture work is necessary in order to investigate academic performance associated with other varia -bles that might influence the child's development, such as parenting behavior or psych osocial factors.