Abstract
The aim of this study is to determine perceptions of secondary school students towards effectiveness of their school in terms of effective school characteristics such as 'Secure and Regular Environment', 'High Academic Expectations', 'Instructional Leadership', 'Learning Opportunities', 'Monitoring School Learnings' and 'Positive School-Parent Relationship', and to determine the predictive power of such perceptions for student achievement (in terms of year-end academic average grade). In this study, the data on student perceptions of school effectiveness and student achievement were collected by 'The Scale for Effective School (SFES)' which is developed by Gunal [1]. The validity evidences on SFES were obtained by explanatory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis methods. The CFA yielded good fit indices (RMSEA(0.042)) in terms of construct validity of SFES. These results revealed that the measuring construct of the scale is statistically significant and consistent. As an evidence of internal reliability of the SFES, Cronbach's alpha coefficient for total scale was computed as α=0.91. For the main study, participants (n=4472) were comprised of students attending the grades from 5 to 8 in 13 secondary schools in the centre of Trabzon during the 2012-2013 academic year. The schools were selected according to the criteria of transportation convenience. Collected data by SFES were analyzed by multivariate regression analysis method. According to the participants' perceptions, the most effective school dimension was found as 'Instructional Leadership'. The results of the multivariate regression analysis reveal that variables (Instructional Leadership, High Academic Expectations, Monitoring School Learnings, Positive School-Home Relationship, Learning Opportunities offered to all students) of effective schools all together explain 27 % of students' year-end academic achievement scores.
Highlights
Education is one of the oldest activities in mankind history
According to results of the descriptive statistics, the importance levels of effective school dimensions from the students’ point of view were found respectively as “Instructional Leadership, Positive School-Parent Relationship, Secure and Regular Environment, Learning Opportunities Offered to All Students in School, Monitoring School Learnings and High Academic Expectations
According to standardized β coefficients in the regression equation, the five dimensions of effective schools could predict students’ achievements significantly, which were Secure and Regular Environment, High Academic Expectations, Positive School-Parent Relationship, Instructional Leadership, and Learning Opportunities offered to all students in school, respectively
Summary
Education is one of the oldest activities in mankind history. Education emerges as a social problem because it is used for transferring, preserving, changing and refreshing the social values in order to equip individuals with personality, value and ability [2]. There is not a single definition accepted by all, education is considered as "the process of deliberately causing desired changes in individuals’ behaviour through their experiences [3] In another definition, education is defined as entire of the activities towards gaining of certain mental, physical, emotional and social abilities, behaviours and knowledge in the process of humans’ trying to perform their own inner nature as a purposeful action for acquisition of individual development and social competence [4]. Effective school is described by Edmonds [5] as the place to acquire basic skills for academically powerful and weak students In this regard; effective school can be defined as a continuously learning and improving organization in which all students can learn, the focus of which is the equality and quality elements, resources are available to all students, providing students and employees with a safe environment open for development, and accountable to all stakeholders. The most common features for effective schools are Secure and Regular Environment, Teaching Leadership, High Academic Expectations, Monitoring School Learning’s, Positive School-Home Relationship, Learning Opportunities
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