Teachers spend most of their time in school in classrooms, and their instruction and teaching practices may be affected by classroom context such as class size. We examine whether teacher effects interact with classroom context such as class size. Specifically, we seek to determine whether teacher effects are more pronounced in small classes than…

Living in a single-parent family is negatively related with children's educational performance compared to living with 2 biological parents. In this article, we aim to find out to what extent the context of the school's share of single-parent families affects this negative relationship. We use pooled data from the Organisation for…

The primary aim of this study was to investigate whether and, if so, how formal teacher competence relates to the relationship between pupil reading achievement and teachers judgements' of pupils' reading achievement. The data come from the Swedish participation in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2001 in…

This study investigated the effect of class practices on students' learning gains in reading comprehension in the 5th grade. A sample of 4,344 students in 283 classes in 176 schools was studied. Several class practices that have previously been demonstrated to be effective were tested while controlling for student characteristics and…

The article employs exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) to evaluate constructs of economic, cultural, and social capital in international large-scale assessment (LSA) data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006 and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009. ESEM integrates the…

This study adopted a quantitative methodology involving a matched sample of federated and non-federated schools and utilising multilevel modelling techniques to explore the impact of federations on student outcomes. The sample involves a total of 50 school districts and 264 schools. These are grouped into 122 federations; 264 comparator schools…

The present study examines from the contingency opportunities perspective the influence of contextual factors on principals' learning-centered leadership using HLM. Participants were 18,641 school principals from 73 jurisdictions who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009. Results showed that principals…

In evaluating the deleterious effects of missing in-school time, research has almost exclusively focused on absences, and almost no attention has been paid to tardiness. Hence, this study contributes a new dimension to the field by examining the effects of student tardiness on academic achievement. Employing an empirical model on a large-scale,…

This article uses an educational effectiveness approach to model the impact of student, school, and educational system characteristics on several cognitive and non-cognitive student outcomes related to citizenship education. Using multivariate multilevel analysis, data from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational…

This paper aims to investigate how stability varies with the approach used in estimating school performance in a large sample of English primary schools. The results show that (a) raw performance is considerably more stable than adjusted performance, which in turn is slightly more stable than growth model estimates; (b) schools' performance…

This project investigates the impact of the dynamic approach to school improvement (DASI) aiming to help schools face and reduce bullying through integrating research on bullying with educational effectiveness research (EER). A network of approximately 15 schools in each participating country (i.e., Belgium, Cyprus, England, Greece, and The…

The long-term effects of secondary-school reforms in the first half of the 20th century are investigated through the long-term follow up of a sample of people born in Scotland in 1936 who were first surveyed in 1947. Members of the sample who were living in the Lothian region of Scotland were re-interviewed in 2004-2007, providing information…

The present study investigates the effects of teachers (background qualifications, attitudes and beliefs, and instructional practices) on student achievement in mathematics, reading, and spelling in 1st grade. Its theoretical framework and methodology are based on recent work by Palardy and Rumberger (2008). Data from the SiBO Project, a…

A brief 15-item version of the California School Climate Scale (Brief-CSCS) is presented to fill a need for a measure that could be used for periodic monitoring of school personnel's general perception of the climate of their school campus. From a sample of 81,261 California school personnel, random subsamples of 2,400 teachers and 2,400…

This article focuses on the use of a value-added approach for promoting school improvement. It presents yearly value-added estimates, analyses their stability over time, and discusses the contribution of this methodological approach for promoting school improvement programmes in the Portuguese system of evaluation. The value-added model is applied…