The present study investigated multilevel models posited to predict student approaches to homework. Participants were 1,072 middle school students in China. Results revealed that deep and surface approaches were positively associated with performance-approach. Furthermore, deep approach to homework was associated negatively with homework cost, yet…

Educators commonly use school climate survey scores to inform and evaluate interventions for equitably improving learning and reducing educational disparities. Unfortunately, validity evidence to support these (and other) score uses often falls short. In response, Whitehouse et al. proposed a collaborative, two-part validity testing framework for…

Many research problems in social science involve multilevel phenomena. However, discussions about multilevel research designs are limited in the mixed methods (MM) literature. Building on early writings in the field, this methodological discussion advances a refined definition of a multilevel MM research design. The refinement emerges from a…

Informed by two theoretical models of homework effects, we extended a model of homework on mathematics achievement in a large sample of Chinese eighth graders. Our model incorporated six clusters of homework variables -- student background factors, homework characteristics, teacher variables, parent variables, student motivation, and homework…

In recent years, the Royal Government of Cambodia has strongly emphasised the issue of school dropout. To date, many Cambodian workers have still not completed at least nine years of basic education due to the high dropout rate. Additionally, a great number of students at the secondary level continue to leave school early. To deal with the high…

Current practices for growth mixture modeling emphasize the importance of the proper parameterization and number of classes, but the impact of these decisions on latent class composition and the substantive implications has not been thoroughly addressed. Using measures of behavior from 575 middle school students, we compared the results of several…

We examined student reading achievement in rural and non-rural school districts in Texas. Our research questions probed the improvement in student performance over time, differences in the number of students achieving at different performance levels, and the impact of district-level characteristics on reading achievement. Through quantitative…

Background: A common critique of adventure education research methodology is the overreliance on pre-/post-study designs to measure change. Purpose: This paper compares and contrasts two methods of data analysis on the same adventure education data set to show how these distinct approaches provide starkly different results and interpretation.…

Past research suggests that a sense of belonging to a community is developmentally important for adolescents and affects their engagement in school, especially during the transition to high school. However, little research examines the teaching practices that simultaneously foster classroom belonging and behavioral engagement to create a classroom…

The goal of the current study is to examine the degree to which measures of quality of implementation and student engagement moderate pretest--posttest changes in mediating variables that are targeted by DARE "keepin' it REAL." DARE officers (10 elementary school, five middle school) taught DARE "keepin' it REAL lessons to 1,017…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the 3-year trajectory of students' interest in learning physical activity (PA) knowledge during middle school and the effects of gender and prior knowledge on the trajectory. Methods: Using a repeated-measures design, a cohort of 447 sixth-grade students' interest in learning PA knowledge was…

Based on the data of China Family Panel Studies 2016 (CFPS 2016), this study analyzed the effect of teacher wage index on students' participation in extracurricular tutoring through a two-layer linear model. We found that the wage index of elementary and middle schools teachers in China is generally low, and this index had a significant negative…

In an era of social media, and amid the coronavirus pandemic, teachers' curation of instructional resources stands as an opportunity to observe teachers' planning and conceptualization of their practice in real time. This work explores the resources teachers curate, their rigor, and the effects on students' learning across years. Merging big data…

Since the early 2000s, educational evaluation research has primarily centered on teachers', rather than schools', contributions to students' academic outcomes due to concerns that estimates of the latter were smaller, less stable, and more prone to measurement error. We argue that this disparity should be reduced. Using administrative data from…

Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) has become an increasingly popular multilevel method of analyzing data among nested datasets, in particular, the effect of specialized academic programming within schools. The purpose of this methodological study is to demonstrate the use of HLM to determine the effectiveness of STEM programming in an Ohio middle…