Bandura's influential theory has been used to argue that teachers with high self-efficacy will be more effective at increasing pupil achievement--and a voluminous empirical literature has repeatedly documented associations consistent with this claim. However, few studies have considered whether these correlations reflect an underlying causal…

This paper examines the mediating role of parental literacy and numeracy involvement before the child entered school in the relationship between family socio-economic status (SES) and students' interest in reading and mathematics. Causal mediation analysis is applied to international assessment data from the Trends in International Mathematics and…

To answer the calls for stronger evidence by the policy community, educational researchers and their associated organizations increasingly demand more studies that can yield causal inferences. International large scale assessments (ILSAs) have been targeted as a rich data sources for causal research. It is in this context that we take up a…

In educational effectiveness research, it frequently has proven difficult to make credible inferences about cause and effect relations. The article first identifies the main categories of threats to valid causal inference from observational data, and discusses designs and analytic approaches which protect against them. With the use of data from 22…