While the family is a critical determinant of educational achievement, methodological difficulties and the availability of data limit estimation of the family contribution in school effectiveness models. This study uses multilevel modeling to estimate the proportion of variation in student educational achievement between families, family-level…

Although there is recognition that there may be differential outcomes for groups of students within schools, examination of outcomes for subgroups presents challenges to researchers and policymakers. It complicates analytic procedures, particularly when the number of students per school in the subgroup is small. We explored five alternatives for…

A continuing challenge for the education system is how to evaluate the wider outcomes of schools. Wider measures of success--such as citizenship or lifelong learning--influence each other and emerge over time from complex interactions between students, teachers and leaders, and the wider community. Unless methods are found to evaluate these…

This paper reports on secondary analysis of TIMSS 2003 data with the aim of explaining the difference in science achievement of Korean and South African learners. The question asked by this research, i.e. which factors at various educational levels influence science achievement in Korea and South Africa respectively, is addressed from the…

Relatively little research has explored whether schools differ in their effectiveness for different group of pupils (e.g. by ethnicity, poverty or gender), for different curriculum subjects (e.g. English, mathematics or science) or over time (different cohorts). This paper uses multilevel modelling to analyse the national test results at age 7 and…