Metropolitan, Urban, and Rural Regions – How Regional Differences Affect Elementary School Students’ Academic Achievement, Well-Being, and Motivation

This study examined regional differences in students’ academic achievement, well-being, and motivation as well as factors explaining systematic variation. We used the complete representative German PIRLS 2016 data (N = 3,959 fourth-grade students, mean(age)= 10.34 years; 49% girls; 71% from a non-immigrant background) by combining bootstrapping, multiple imputations, principal component analysis, and LASSO. We accounted for missing information and avoided overfitting in the high-dimensional feature space by adopting established machine learning methods. Grouping regions into three categories – rural, (sub-)urban, and metropolitan, we found that students from rural and metropolitan regions have on average higher academic achievement, well-being, and reading interest. Our results imply that regional variation is (mostly) accounted for by controlling for teacher or school-level characteristics – student and parent characteristics are not necessarily sufficient. Most characteristics are predetermined, directly affected by policy decisions, and entail, inter alia, school resources, organization and structure of the curricula, and teacher sorting