Abstract
This study was an investigation of the effect on attitudinal and cognitive variables of minority or majority group membership in the classroom. Three categories of schools were selected, with high (80 per cent), medium (50 per cent) and low (20 per cent) enrolments of migrant children respectively, and the entire Grade 6 population was tested. For non-migrant children, the low group was significantly superior to the high group on reading achievement tasks, but not on non-verbal cognitive tasks. Non-migrant children in high migrant density schools had better attitudes to school and motivation to achieve. For migrant children the medium group was superior on the cognitive tasks. There were no significant differences between non-migrant and migrant children in the medium group on any variable, but for both the high and low groups the non-migrants performed significantly better on the cognitive tasks. The results were interpreted in terms of a peer-language model, i.e. the availability to children of appropriate language models at school.