School organization,school location and student achievement

Conclusions The results refer to grade 6, at the class-teacher level. We cannot deny the possibility that centralization at higher levels may have other pedagogical and organizational consequences. There seems no doubt that centralization to large units has a number of obvious advantages. It gives students greater possibilities of choosing lines of study and of specializing. It makes it possible to care for handicapped students better, makes better equipment available, and so on. Nevertheless, what has been found shows that care must be taken in centralization, particularly of young pupils. Centralization may have an upper limit; the distance between home and school may be so great that the negative results outweigh the positive ones. Further, the school to which centralization is made may be of doubtful quality, and the gains expected may not be forthcoming. In other words, the larger school must be able to take advantage of its greater pedagogical possibilities. It is not least this that justifies research on the school problems of sparsely populated regions, the problems of small schools and of long journeys to school. In the long run, it may help not only students living in rural areas, but all students.

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Schulorganisation, Schulweg und Schülerleistung

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Organisation scolaire, trajet habitation-ecole, resultats scolaires

     

Improving student achievement

A cognitive processing capacity model of teaching and studying improved immediate posttest and delayed posttest performances of low-ability students, while it reduced performance differences between the low- and high-ability students. A skeletal study outline and a restudy and retest provision also made positive contributions to performance.     

School tenure and student achievement

While much empirical research concerns job tenure, this paper introduces the concept of school tenure and further examines whether and how school tenure impacts student outcomes using a rich set of cohort data from England’s secondary schools. Using the number of times a student switched schools during the academic year as an instrument to measure school tenure to fully account for endogeneity issues, the resulting two-stage least squares estimates suggest that the effects of school tenure are positive and heterogeneous across students. While advantaged students are more likely to gain when their own school tenure is longer, disadvantaged students benefit if their peers have longer tenure. This significant heterogeneous effect suggests that school tenure may not simply act as the inverse of school mobility but may represent a potential determinant of student achievement and an effective school-specific measure for policymakers and practitioners. The relevant implications are accordingly discussed.     

Effects of staff and student tutors on student achievement

In the problem-based curriculum of the faculty of Law, students of the first year are guided by staff tutors or undergraduate student tutors in small tutorial groups. In this study, academic achievement of staff tutor-guided groups are compared with student tutor-guided groups. After an eight-week course students' level of academic achievement was tested by essay questions. Two methods of assessing students' performance are used: expert judgements and propositional analysis. Results of both methods used indicate that no differences in academic achievement occur. Students guided by student tutors perform as well as students guided by staff tutors. Several explanations are proposed to account for these results.     

Charter school authorizers and student achievement

In this paper we analyze the relationship between charter school authorizers and student achievement. We perform this analysis using a 10-year panel dataset from Minnesota, a state that permits four distinct types of authorizers—local school boards, postsecondary institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the Minnesota Department of Education. The results of the analysis indicate that there is no statistically significant relationship between charter school authorizing type and mean levels of student achievement. However, the analysis also reveals that schools authorized by nonprofit organizations exhibit substantially more variability in achievement than schools authorized by local school boards.     

Online teaching,procrastination and student achievement

Despite growing consensus in the public debate that self-discipline is key to succeeding in an online learning environment, the evidence available is very limited. We investigate the role of procrastination as a moderator of the impact of online teaching on student performance. We take advantage of the forced transition from traditional class-based to online teaching induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and adopt a difference-in-differences strategy using administrative data of four cohorts of students enrolled in an Italian University. We find that online teaching has reduced student performance by about 1.4 credits per semester on average (0.11 Standard Deviations). However, this aggregate effect masks great heterogeneity as the negative influence on performance varies significantly according to student tendency to procrastinate with online teaching being particularly detrimental for students affected by present-bias problems. The total negative effect for procrastinators amounts to more than 18% of the workload for a semester, so implying a potential delay of approximately two semesters in the expected date of graduation for students following an online as opposed to a face-to-face five-year Degree course.     

State teacher union strength and student achievement

A new and very small literature has provided evidence that students have lower test scores in larger school districts and in districts in which the district's teachers union has negotiated a contract that is more favorable to the district's teachers. The teachers’ unions at the state and national levels contribute a great deal of money to candidates for state and federal offices. This gives the unions some influence in passing (defeating) bills that would help (harm) the state's teachers. We introduce two novel measures of the strength of the state-wide teachers union: union dues per teacher and union expenditures per student. These reflect the key role of political influence for state-wide unions. We provide remarkably strong evidence that students in states with strong teachers unions have lower proficiency rates than students in states with weak state-wide teacher unions.     

Enhancing student achievement through computer-generated homework

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of interactive computer-generated homework on student achievement. Of two sections of Physical Science I, one received homework via the computer; the other received printed, equivalent homework assignments. The results of this study indicate that the use of drill-and-practice computer homework minimizes differences among students with a corresponding decrease in the correlation between posttest scores and entry-level combined ACT science and mathematics scores. The results also support the basic assumption of mastery learning that appropriate instruction will decrease the relationship between aptitude and achievement.     

Teacher expectations and student literacy engagement and achievement

Notwithstanding the complex and dynamic nature of teaching and learning in schools, over four decades of research findings have consistently revealed a correlation between teacher expectations and student achievement. Focusing on teacher expectations for the narrative structures created by young children, this article features a discussion of data gathered during a multifaceted study with 7‐ and 8‐year‐old students. The overall purpose of the case study research was to explore the development of student understanding of elements of visual art and design and diverse narrative structures in picturebooks. For the culminating activity of the research, the students had opportunities to apply and transform their knowledge of the instructional foci when they composed their own multimodal print texts. Analysis of the students' narrative structures revealed the multiple forms of metalepsis, the purposeful breaking of storyworld/narrative boundaries, evident in their writing and artwork. In addition to a discussion about the socially situated nature of the children's multimodal text‐making, the article includes a consideration of the importance of teacher expectations with respect to student literacy engagement and achievement.     

Teacher credentials and student achievement: Longitudinal analysis with student fixed effects

We use a rich administrative dataset from North Carolina to explore questions related to the relationship between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student achievement on the other. Though the basic questions underlying this research are not new—and, indeed, have been explored in many papers over the years within the rubric of the “education production function”—the availability of data on all teachers and students in North Carolina over a 10-year period allows us to explore them in more detail than has been possible in previous studies. We conclude that a teacher's experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading. Taken together the various teacher credentials exhibit quite large effects on math achievement, whether compared to the effects of changes in class size or to the socio-economic characteristics of students.     

Professional development schools and indicators of student achievement

Abstract

Two approaches were used in a study to examine the relation between indicators of student achievement, including the state mandated standardized achievement test, and the functioning of professional development schools (PDSs). Comparing schools that had PDS relationships with a midwestern university to schools that did not resulted in no significant differences in achievement. When PDS ratings relating to nine PDS goals and functions were compared to achievement indicators, higher staff development ratings were significantly related to higher student achievement. Limitations of the study precludes a definitive causal relation; however, the results suggest the need for further study and suggest the possibility of staff development as a major tool for student achievement in PDSs.     

Immigration and student achievement: Evidence from Switzerland

This paper investigates empirically whether immigrant students in Switzerland perform poorly compared to their native counterparts and provides some explanations. Using a national sample of the 2000 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) database, we first analyze the impact of immigrant status on pupils’ achievement. We find a negative and significant impact of immigrant status on test scores in reading, mathematics and science literacy, even after controlling for a set of characteristics. We then decompose the observed reading score gap between Swiss and immigrant students to identify whether gaps in endowments explain test score differences along the distribution. Lower endowments explain most of the achievement gap in reading between Swiss and second-generation immigrants. However, lower returns explain around one quarter of the achievement gap between Swiss and first-generation immigrants for the weakest pupils.     

Online self-paced high-school class size and student achievement

Educational technology research and development - In the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom, small classes are generally perceived as desirable, but the benefits associated with particular...     

The longitudinal effects of achievement goals and perceived control on university student achievement

In the area of achievement motivation, students’ beliefs pertaining to achievement goals and perceived control have separately guided a large amount theoretical and empirical research. However, limited research has considered the simultaneous effects of goals and control on achievement. The purpose of this study was to examine primary and secondary control as potential mediators of the effects of mastery and performance goals on achievement, measured as final percentage in Introductory Psychology and GPA. The sample consisted of 224 first-year university students at a Canadian doctoral granting university. All participants completed two surveys and consented to release their grades to the researchers. We found that neither performance goals nor mastery goals had direct effects on achievement. However, performance goals had a positive indirect effect on achievement through primary control. Indirect effects also emerged for mastery goals, positively through primary control and negatively through secondary control. These results offer one explanation for the often-found non-significant relationship between mastery and achievement and are discussed in light of interventions aimed to modify goals and/or control and thereby increase achievement.