School Composition Effects Research Articles

School composition and academic decisions

Abstract Research on the effects of school composition tends to focus on how it shapes school achievement. In this study, we instead examine how school composition shapes children’s educational aspirations, given their achievement, and if children from different socio-economic backgrounds are affected differently. We apply school-fixed effects on Swedish register data, including all 9th-grade students from 2013 to 2017. Being exposed to a high share of low-achieving schoolmates increases the likelihood of applying for academics instead of vocational tracking across socio-economic backgrounds. In contrast, the share of high-achieving schoolmates is negatively associated with academic tracking only for high-SES children. Being exposed to peers with highly educated parents increases the likelihood of applying for academic tracking for low-SES children, whereas the effect is weaker or even negative for some of the high-SES groups. Together, our results suggest that the academic decisions of both high- and low-SES children could benefit from a less segregated school environment.

The substantiveness of socioeconomic school compositional effects in Australia: measurement error and the relationship with academic composition

This study examines the effect of school socioeconomic composition on student achievement growth in Australian schooling, and its relationship with academic composition utilising the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) dataset. Previous research has found that school composition predicts a range of schooling outcomes. A critique of school compositional research has been that measurement error may have biased findings of compositional effects. Prior studies have found that socioeconomic compositional effect sizes are small when models include academic composition. The relationship between socioeconomic and academic compositions has yet to be fully determined. Multi-level regressions and structural equation models were compared to estimate the degree of bias in socioeconomic compositional effects due to measurement error. Multi-level path models were used to test if academic composition mediated the relationship between socioeconomic composition and achievement growth. The results showed that measurement error did not bias compositional effects in the dataset, and academic composition mediates the relationship between socioeconomic composition and achievement growth. We argue that school value-add research should include academic composition to account for contextual effects. The socioeconomic compositional effect is of practical significance to policy makers and educational researchers due to its relative size compared to average student achievement growth. Potential reforms include ensuring public subsidies to private schools in Australia do not increase school segregation and the amelioration of the effects of residential segregation through school funding reforms.

An Examination of Science Achievement and School Compositional Effects in Ireland Using TIMSS Data

<p style="text-align:justify">Recent educational policy initiatives in Ireland have focused on improving outcomes in reading and mathematics among students, particularly those experiencing educational disadvantage. However, science achievement in Irish primary schools has received much less research attention, especially in the context of educational disadvantage. This article examines science achievement and its relationship to school compositional effects in primary schools at the national level, including school-average indicators of the school context, as well as examining factors associated with science achievement in three distinct categories of schools (those with high, moderate, or minor levels of educational disadvantage). The data are drawn from the Fourth grade Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015 database for Ireland. Multilevel analyses were implemented in a stepwise manner. Findings suggest the relevance of school contexts with regard to science achievement. Before including school-level contextual variables, students from ‘minor disadvantaged’ schools achieved significantly higher science scores than students from schools with ‘moderate’ or ‘high’ levels of disadvantaged. However, this difference disappears after controlling for predictors at the school level. The findings highlight the importance of the home environment, including early numeracy activities and skills before children start school. Results are discussed with regard to educational policy and educational practice in Ireland.</p>

A search for the determinants of students’ educational expectations for higher education in four European cities: The role of school SES composition and student engagement

Social inequality in students’ educational expectations, a strong predictor of educational attainment, differs substantially between countries. Although education system characteristics are translated into school composition effects, the school level is often forgotten in comparative research. Moreover, to explain school effects, we introduce the concept of student engagement into sociological research on expectations. Results of multilevel analyses (R) on data from 7566 students in 126 high schools in four cities—Barcelona (Spain), Ghent (Belgium), Bergen (Norway), and Reykjavík (Iceland)—demonstrated positive effects of (1) SES composition, but mainly in systems with substantial school segregation, (2) behavioral and emotional engagement on expectations.

Does school socioeconomic composition matter more in some countries than others, and if so, why?

ABSTRACT International research has consistently found that the socioeconomic segregation of schools may worsen inequalities in schooling outcomes through the socioeconomic compositional effect. This study examines whether the socioeconomic compositional effect varies between developed countries and potential mechanisms by which national schooling systems moderate its effect. The results suggest that the socioeconomic compositional effect does vary between developed countries and that national differences in its size were partially explained by policies of tracking age and the proportion of students that attend public schools. We conclude schooling systems in developed countries would require substantial reform to reduce the detrimental effects of school composition on disadvantaged students.

Racial and gender disparities in elementary mathematics

AbstractDisparities in Mathematics performance have been shown across race and gender for decades, although little research has reported the race by gender nexus in terms of disparity. In turn, research done to ameliorate these disparities have assumed that these differences are primarily among student populations who need remedial learning improvement. In this research, we test these assumptions by using multinomial regression analyses and adjusted mean comparisons with bias‐corrected effect sizes from a data set of ~20,000 2nd grade students in Chicago. Further, we contribute to previous elementary Mathematics research by illuminating the powerful impacts that spatial reasoning integrations into Mathematics curriculum and pedagogy can have for all students' learning. Our findings provide empirical support that even after accounting for the effects of school composition, racial disparities exist in the beginning and persist throughout the year, among 2nd grade students. However, upon disaggregating students by race, gender, and median split, such disparities are greatest among students that are above the median. Our results encourage quantitative research analyses that explore ways to reduce Mathematics disparities to sharpen their approaches to be more sensitive to the achievement levels of students among such equity inquiries.

Comment on M.G. Sciffer, L.B. Perry, & A.M. McConney, “critiques of socio-economic school compositional effects: are they valid?”

In a recent article in this journal, Sciffer, Perry, and McConney identify the risk of relying on insufficient within-unit variation as a serious flaw in a number of studies using student fixed effects regression to identify the effects of school socioeconomic composition (school SES) on academic achievement, including one by Armor, Marks, and Malatinszky. In this comment, we revisit our estimates in light of this potential risk, and we demonstrate that within-student variation in school SES in the three settings studied was substantial and sufficient for the use of student fixed effects regression. In further sensitivity analyses, we find that the original results, as well as their levels of precision, are robust to the exclusion of students moving between schools, who Sciffer et al. suggest to be the unreliable major source of longitudinal variation in school SES.

Appropriate modelling of school compositional effects: a response to Malatinszky and Armor, and Marks

We respond to Malatinszky and Armor’s, and Marks’ comments on our article recently published in this journal. We agree with Marks in the use of prior achievement to control for spurious effects in school effects research. Marks makes an incorrect statement about our article, refers to dated critiques, and presents an empirical demonstration with some problems. We agree with Malatinszky and Armor that school composition may have sufficient within-student variation to detect a potential effect on achievement growth in fixed-effects models. We argue that fixed-effects models exclude most of the variation in socioeconomic composition, are incapable of measuring the commonly defined conceptualisation of school composition and can mischaracterise the relative importance of socioeconomic composition.

Unravelling socioeconomic school composition effects on higher education enrollment: the role of students’ individual and shared feelings of futility and self-efficacy

Despite the massification of higher education, social inequality in higher education outcomes still persists. It is known that secondary schools’ socioeconomic composition is at least partly responsible for this social inequality. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which socioeconomic composition affects higher education enrollment are still poorly understood. Based on the attribution theory, this study expects students’ feelings of academic self-efficacy and sense of futility to act as underlying mechanisms. Additionally, given that individual self-efficacy beliefs and individual sense of futility are shared among students within schools — that is, schools have different self-efficacy and futility cultures — we investigate whether these cultures are consequential for higher education enrollment and program choice. Results of binomial logistic multilevel analyses on the data of the International Study of City Youth ( www.iscy.org ) in Ghent, consisting of 1214 Flemish students across 29 schools, indicated that students in low socioeconomic composition schools are less likely to enroll in higher education because these schools are characterized by high futility cultures. In contrast, high self-efficacy and self-efficacy cultures are positively associated with the choice for academic bachelor programs, but they did not explain socioeconomic composition effects. We conclude that educational policies should aim at increasing a sense of control over academic outcomes in order to improve social equality in higher education outcomes.

A Metaregression Analysis of the Effects of School Racial and Ethnic Composition on K–12 Reading, Language Arts, and English Outcomes

Racial and ethnic differences in educational outcomes significantly narrowed during the 1970s and 1980s when K–12 public schools were desegregated. However, when schools resegregated starting roughly in the late 1980s, racial gaps in outcomes widened again. Because of literacy’s pivotal role in learning, the authors investigate if segregation contributes to racial gaps in K–12 reading performance. Drawing upon structural vulnerability and cumulative advantage/disadvantage theories to frame this study, the authors conduct multilevel metaregression analyses of 131 effect sizes from 30 primary studies to investigate if school composition effects contribute to racial gaps in K–12 reading outcomes and if any effects vary in magnitude or direction for students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds or grade levels. The metaregression analyses control for the primary studies’ regression model characteristics and research designs. The results indicate a small, negative, statistically significant relationship between the percentage of a school’s disadvantaged minority enrollment and the mean reading achievement of the students who attend it. The negative association is stronger when segregation is measured by percentage Black and is stronger for high school students. These two findings suggest that the disadvantages of segregated education cumulate as more structurally vulnerable students transition from elementary to secondary school. Additional results suggest that a school’s racial composition effect is not the same as its socioeconomic status composition effect. The two organizational characteristics have distinct, albeit interrelated, influences on reading scores. Together the findings suggest that racially and ethnically segregated schooling both reflects and helps reproduce racial/ethnic inequality in literacy outcomes.

Critiques of socio-economic school compositional effects: are they valid?

School socio-economic compositional (SEC) effects have been influential in educational research predicting a range of outcomes and influencing public policy. However, some recent studies have challenged the veracity of SEC effects when applying residualised-change and fixed effects models and simulating potential measurement errors in hierarchical regression models. We review the residualised change and fixed effects methods in critical studies and find limitations in their capacity to demonstrate null compositional effects. We show this with an adjusted residualised change model finding significant SEC effects. We show structural equation models can address concerns that measurement errors inflate SEC effects by comparing hierarchical regression models to structural equation models. We find that structural equation models can detect SEC effects free from measurement error. We conclude that the reviewed critiques of SEC effects were due to methods unlikely to detect compositional effects. Future research would benefit from the identification of mediators of SEC effects.

Vocational and academic decisions in ‘classed’ school environments

ABSTRACT By studying population-wide panels of 10th graders in Norway, I investigate the association between the social class composition of cohorts in schools and choosing an academic as opposed to a vocational track at upper-secondary level. Two steps are used to study this relationship. First, I use multilevel models estimating the group level model simultaneously with the regression of the individual-level model. Second, by using 11 panels of 10th graders, I employ school fixed effects to get closer to an estimate of school compositional effects happening within the school. Both models find that the proportion of upper-class peers at lower-secondary schools is associated with the increased likelihood of choosing academic tracks at the upper-secondary level, and especially for students who are not from upper-class backgrounds. This suggests that the ‘classed’ nature of educational decision-making is also embedded in contexts beyond familial ones.

The forgotten role of teachers in students’ educational aspirations. School composition effects and the buffering capacity of teachers’ expectations culture

Research on students’ aspirations, an important predictor of educational attainment, is mostly focused on individual-level determinants, reflecting the classical status attainment model. Studies have suggested a school composition effect, but ignore school processes. Inspired by new insights in school effects research looking at teachers’ expectations at the school level, we investigate the mediating and moderating role of teachability culture in the relationship between SES composition and aspirations. Multilevel analyses of data (2013–2014) from 2.354 students and 502 teachers across 30 Flemish secondary schools show that teachers’ shared expectations can compensate for the detrimental effects of low SES composition on aspirations.

School Socioeconomic Composition as a Factor of Educational Inequality Reproduction

It can be inferred from international findings that school socioeconomic composition (SEC) is a major factor of educational inequality in secondary education at the school level. SEC is believed to have a positive relationship with student achievement along with individual student characteristics. However, a review of research methods used in most studies calls the existence of an influence into question.A study was carried out to evaluate causal relations between school SEC and student achievement. Multilevel regression analysis and propensity score matching (PSM) methods were applied to the panel study Trajectories in Education and Careers data in order to measure the effects of one year of study at schools with low vs. high socioeconomic composition. Correlational and quasi-experimental effect sizes were compared.Analysis results confirm that school SEC is a key factor of educational inequality in Russian secondary education, the inequality effects of school composition overlapping only partially with those of school location. Within a year of schooling, ninth-graders with similar individual characteristics may lose up to a quarter of standard error in PISA‑2012 scores if attending a school with low socioeconomic composition, while attending a high-SEC school would improve their educational outcomes by the end of the ninth grade. Negative effects were observed for two subject areas, which allows suggesting a systematic impact of SEC on student achievement. The final part of the article describes the theoretical and practical significance of the findings and presents the main directions of further research in this field.

Do Schools Reduce or Exacerbate Inequality? How the Associations Between Student Achievement and Achievement Growth Influence Our Understanding of the Role of Schooling

This article explores how the associations between student achievement and achievement growth influence our understanding of the role schools play in academic inequality. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011 (ECLS-K:2011), we constructed parallel growth and lagged score models within both seasonal learning and school effects frameworks to study how student- and school-level socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds relate to student learning. Our findings suggest that seasonal comparative scholars, who generally argue that schools play an equalizing role, and scholars focused on school compositional effects, who typically report that schools exacerbate inequality, come to these contrasting findings not only because they ask different questions but also because they treat student initial achievement differently when modeling student learning.

Educational Achievement of Indigenous Students in Chile: School Composition and Peer Effects

This article focuses on observed achievement differentials between indigenous and non-indigenous students in Chile. Using national test score data, it confirms the findings from previous literature that ethnic gaps in educational achievement exist, though they are small and to a large extent explained by family socioeconomic status. The results indicate that school composition with respect to the socioeconomic background and indigenous status of students matters for academic achievement. Controlling for the student’s socioeconomic background, the ethnic composition of the school attended is associated with student achievement. In schools where the ethnic composition is higher than the national average, the test score disadvantage of indigenous students is larger, especially for those students whose parents both identify as indigenous. The implications of the research underscore the complexities surrounding the creation of equal educational opportunities for indigenous populations in segregated contexts.

School effects on Chilean children’s achievement growth in language and mathematics: An accelerated growth curve model

ABSTRACTThis study investigates school effects on primary school students’ language and mathematics achievement trajectories in Chile, a context of particular interest given its large between-school variability in educational outcomes. The sample features an accelerated longitudinal design (3 time points, 4 cohorts) together spanning Grades 3 to 8 (n = 19,704 students in 156 schools). The magnitudes of school effects on students’ growth trajectories were found to be sizeable (generally larger than school effects in Western industrialised countries) and moderately consistent across school subjects. School composition effects on student achievement status were found for both school subjects. However, there was no evidence of composition effects on student achievement growth. The study provides new evidence on the size and nature of school effects in a developing country context based on state-of-the-art methods (i.e., accelerated longitudinal and growth curve models).

School composition effects: A realist critique of "qualitative" studies in New Zealand

Considerable international attention has been given to the school composition or mix effect. It is accepted almost as a matter of common sense that schools with a high concentration of working-class students face particular difficulties, associated with peer group resistance, and that as a result their overall performance levels are generally depressed. The most recent presentation of this thesis has been offered by Thrupp's (1999) qualitative study linked to the influential New Zealand Smithfield project (Lauder & Hughes, 1999). Thrupp's evidence is subjected to a critical examination using, in a triangulation exercise, data from a parallel case study. The analysis does not support Thrupp's central hypothesis. The theoretical and methodological implications of these incompatible findings for qualitative and quantitative research are discussed. A realist strategy able to overcome this dichotomy, which confuses matters of scientific method with matters of data collection technique, is outlined. The paper argues in conclusion that the ability of low-SES schools to realise the capacities of their students is likely to be enhanced if they are empowered to support the effective non-cognitive dispositions of students that drive progress at school.

School composition, family poverty and child behaviour

PurposeThere is little research on the role of school composition in young children’s behaviour. School composition effects may be particularly important for children in disadvantaged circumstances, such as those growing up in poverty. We explored the role of school academic and socio-economic composition in internalising problems, externalising problems and prosocial behaviour at age 7 years, and tested if it moderates the effect of family poverty on these outcomes.MethodsWe used data from 7225 7-year-olds of the Millennium Cohort Study who attended state primary schools in England and for whom we had information on these outcomes. In multiple membership models, we allowed for clustering of children in schools and moves between schools since the beginning of school, at age 5. Our school academic and socio-economic composition variables were school-level achievement and % of pupils eligible for free school-meals, respectively. Poverty (family income below the poverty line) was measured in all sweeps until age 7. We explored the roles of both timing and duration of poverty.ResultsThe effects of poverty were strong and robust to adjustment. School socio-economic composition was associated with individual children’s internalising and externalising problems, even in adjusted models. School composition did not interact with poverty to predict any of the outcomes.ConclusionsNeither the academic nor the socio-economic composition of the school moderated the effect of family poverty on children’s behaviour in primary school. However, children attending schools with more disadvantaged socio-economic intakes had more internalising and externalising problems than their counterparts.

Relative Risk in Context: Exposure to Family and Neighborhood Violence within Schools

This paper evaluates the extent to which four different measures of exposure to risky neighborhood and family environments are associated with individual levels of victimization and attitudes supporting the use of aggression among a large and representative sample of Colombian children and adolescents in 5th and 9th grades (about 49,000 participants nested in 1,648 schools and 295 towns) who were evaluated in 2005. With the aid of random intercept models and adaptive centering, we conceptualize and describe the exposure to neighborhood and family violence reported by each participant as a function of their relative position within and between schools and towns. Results indicate unique and distinct effects of school and town composition on individual outcomes. We present our results as a basic descriptive portrait of the contextual experiences of Colombian students, and discuss how they may be used to identify ecological levels where interventions may be most likely to succeed.