This article examines the impact of within-class age differences on educational outcomes, using students' birth months in Madrid's primary schools as a natural experiment. Employing a regression discontinuity design, we analyze third-grade students to investigate these age-related effects. Additionally, we explore whether early childhood education…

A homogeneous distribution of students in a class is accepted as a key factor for overall success in primary education. A class of students with similar attributes normally increases academic success. It is also a fact that general academic success might be lower in some classes where students have different intelligence and academic levels. In…

This study investigates the impact of the presence of students identified as having special needs (SEN) on their classmates' achievements in reading comprehension. Multi-level regression modelling was conducted with the data of more than 75,000 fourth graders of 4,937 classes in Austria. Students' scores of reading comprehension were used as the…

This study examined the effects of an SLP-delivered whole-class interactive book reading intervention and a professional development program on children's self-initiated participation. Eleven kindergarten teachers and the children in their classes participated in this quasi-experimental study. They were filmed during book reading at pre- and…

Research has demonstrated that preschool teachers are particularly prone to develop burnout symptoms, such as emotional exhaustion. However, which workplace conditions are particularly related to burnout symptoms in preschool teachers remains widely unknown. Hence, this study aims to disentangle personal characteristics (e.g. educational degree,…

Background: Whilst much interest is focused on gender, and classroom-level influences such as and classroom composition and teaching style on achievement, attitudinal outcomes have not received the same attention. This paper focuses on alienation from learning as one sub-dimension of school alienation. School alienation is a relevant issue for all…

In the educational literature on peer effects, attention has been brought to the fact that the mechanisms creating peer effects are still to a large extent hidden in obscurity. The hypothesis in the study reported in this article was that the Frame Factor Theory (FFT) can be used to reveal such mechanisms. Using data from the Swedish TIMSS 2015 (N…

According to dimensional comparison theory (DCT), students evaluate their ability in one domain (e.g., math) by comparing their achievement in that domain with their achievement in other domains (e.g., English). Primarily in research on students' academic self-concept, these comparison processes have been found to lead to positive associations…

At-risk students are overrepresented in disadvantaged segregated primary schools. Often, these students begin with an educational delay and have less parental support, which makes them more dependent on the quality of their education. Since quality of education depends in great measure upon mechanisms at the class level, it is crucial to gain…

Though schools do not track in Brazil, I find that black/white classroom segregation in Brazil is greater than recent estimates from North Carolina high schools (Clotfelter et al., 2020). How does race-based classroom segregation occur without tracking, and in a supposed "racial paradise," no less? Using national, student-level data…

Comparing teachers' self-assessment to classes' assessment of quality of teaching can offer insights for educational research and be a valuable resource for teachers' continuous professional development. However, the quality of teaching needs to be measured in the same way across perspectives for this comparison to be meaningful. We used data from…

Although peer victimization in school mainly takes place between children in the same classroom or grade and bullying is generally seen as a group process, little is known about how stability and change in classroom composition affect peer victimization. Hence, this study addressed the following questions: (a) Are newcomers in the classroom more…

Teacher recommendations are an important factor in the process of track placement, but research has shown that they are biased by pupils' social background. Pupils from higher socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to get the advice to enrol in an academic track than pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds, irrespective of prior…

Our university hosts a diverse student cohort and, in certain discipline areas, international students and domestic students whose first language is not English outnumber their English-speaking peers. On the whole, group projects with these cohorts are challenging, and in particular, the allocation of marks is fraught with difficulty. Awarding the…

In this paper, we assume that students' achievement is influenced not only by a set of individual appraisals such as beliefs about their personal efficacy but also by a set of more systemic factors related to beliefs about their class efficacy as a group. Literature and research review supports that students' beliefs about their efficacy, both as…