School and Student Factors and Their Influence on Affective Mathematics Engagement

Abstract

This study examined the student-level (i.e., gender, home language, and immigration status) and school-level (i.e., school economic disadvantage status) variability of the students’ affective mathematics engagement. It was hypothesized that there is a school effect that contributes toward explaining differences in affective mathematics engagement besides the student-level differences. For the sake of the nested structure of the data in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), we used the Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) methodology. There were 10,221 students from 246 schools in the study. The results of this study explained 5.3% of variance in students’ affective mathematics engagement by school-mean economic disadvantage status, where students’ demographic factors explained 1.2%. The present study contributed to a better understanding of the opportunity to learn variables at the student- and school-level in students’ affective mathematics engagement.