5-Year SSHRC Insight Grant Funded Study Award

Affiliated Researcher Professor Louis Volante Leads 5-Year SSHRC Insight Grant Funded Study with Colleagues at Queen’s University and UNU-MERIT

 Education policies geared toward supporting immigrant students’ transition and integration are increasingly important in an ethnically diverse country such as Canada. The ability to support children’s integration varies greatly across countries and is due to a wide-range of national and regional characteristics. The impacts of these differences have been observed in the results of international achievement surveys – most notably the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA results consistently report a performance gap between non-migrant and immigrant student groups, but these gaps differ significantly across destination countries as well as Canadian provinces. It is within this broader context that Professor Volante has been awarded a 5-year $129,000 Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant as the Principal Investigator of a study that examines the relationship between immigrant student achievement and education policies across Canada. The results of this mixed-methods longitudinal study will have important implications – particularly for senior policymakers seeking the most effective means to improve the educational outcomes of immigrant student groups. Other members of the research team include the Co-Investigator Professor Don Klinger (Associate Dean, Faculty of Education, Queen’s University) and Collaborator Professor Melissa Siegel (Professor and Head of Migration Studies, Maastricht Graduate School of Governance, UNU-MERIT).