Deviant Cases from Expected Performance: The Role of Expectations Beyond Socio- Economic and Cultural Status

Theories of social reproduction describe a general trend in the distribution of educational performances that are grounded in social origins. However, they do not account for those students who fall short of expectations and those who go beyond what is expected. This article aims to understand, net of the socioeconomic and cultural status index, what factors explain the deviation from expected performance. To this end, we conduct quantitative analyses on a sample of 15-year-old Italian students from the OECD PISA 2018 database, with deviation from expected performance as the dependent variable and deviant case analysis as the approach. We first explore sociodemographic and contextual variables at the school level; then, we examine the influence of attitudinal variables like educational and professional expectations. Net of status, familial educational expectations, and individual, firstly professional and secondly educational, expectations are observed to be the most important individual-level factors of the analysis and are able to reshape the known landscape of structural effects on performance inequalities.