Context factors and student achievement in the IEA studies

Periodical
Large-scale Assessments in Education
Volume
4
Year
2016
Issue number
12
Relates to study/studies
TIMSS 2011

Context factors and student achievement in the IEA studies

Evidence from TIMSS

Abstract

The present study investigates what factors related to the school context influence student achievement on TIMSS mathematics tests across countries. A systematic review of the literature on PIRLS, TIMSS, and ICCS was conducted upstream to identify those school, teacher, and classroom factors shown to be useful predictors of student performance in previous IEA studies. Data of student samples representative of grade 8 students from 28 countries who participated in TIMSS 2011 were analysed. The main aim of the present study is to verify what school and teacher characteristics are positively associated with students’ mathematics achievement, mainly focusing on disadvantaged schools. Furthermore, it aims at identifying how school context variables contribute to explaining the performance of students in disadvantaged schools in comparison with more advantaged schools.