Schools’ Emphasis on Academic Success in TIMSS 2015: the case of Finland, Singapore, and Turkey

Abstract

School climate which is specified to be related with many outcomes of the students includes some of the components in which disciplinary climate in schools was expressed as the dominant one. Safety and order in schools which is strongly related with the physical and emotional security stated as one of the indicator of disciplinary climate in schools. Since the opportunities to focus on learning and teaching are more in safe and disciplined schools, the tendency of placing the academic success to the priority is observed more in these schools. In addition, allocating time to emphasizing on academic success is strongly related with having teaching time that is not interrupted by the basic needs of the students. Moreover, academic pressure which reflect the schools’ emphasis on academic success have been discussed in recent studies with its advantages and disadvantages. In this study, by scrutinizing the TIMSS 2015 data, the association of safety, order and disciplined issues, limitation of teaching by students’ needs, academic pressure, teachers’ gender and education level with the schools’ emphasis on academic success was investigated at 4th grade level in three different countries, Finland, Singapore, and Turkey, respectively. Multiple logistic regression was run to analyze the data. The results revealed that schools’ emphasis on academic success varies across three countries after controlling a group of variables. In addition, the estimated odds ratio for the explanatory variable of “safe, orderly and disciplined school” has the highest value among the explanatory variables for all three countries