Paraguay's National System for the Evaluation of Educational Process (SNEPE) conducted census-based Grade-3 mathematics tests in 2015 and 2018, revealing a sharp overall drop in scores. We used these open datasets (n = 182,016) to investigate the source of this decline. We estimated two-level random-intercept models with standardised predictors, first separately for each cohort and then pooled across years with a random slope for year. In both cohorts, teacher attendance-a proxy for opportunity to learn-and socio-economic status (SES) were the strongest predictors of students' performance, while teacher attendance was the strongest predictor of schools' performance. By 2018, additional factors-digital connectivity, a safe climate, and engaged leadership-had become salient. Schools that improved teacher attendance and teacher-parent relations experienced a noticeably smaller decline in scores, yet the SES gradient steepened and the between-school variance rose, signalling emerging equity risks. Policy options centre on attendance monitoring, purposeful family engagement, and violence-prevention measures.
Teachers hold conscious and unconscious beliefs that may reflect biased or stereotypical understandings of diverse student groups. Biased beliefs can negatively shape teacher expectations and teacher-student interactions, ultimately impacting student academic outcomes. One way to combat bias is to increase empathy for those student groups. Virtual Reality (VR) is considered an "empathy machine," enabling participants to take others' perspectives. Included are the findings of a pilot study with 16 teachers designed to evaluate the efficacy of a recently created narrative VR scenario. Developed through research and consultation, participants "live" the day of an Indigenous middle school student in Aotearoa New Zealand. Quantitative measures of teachers' attitudes and beliefs and qualitative data collected through interviews and focus groups were analysed to ascertain the experience's impact on teachers' beliefs, biases, and empathy. The findings show how a VR embodiment experience can impact teachers' beliefs and potentially motivate behaviour change.
Grade retention - although widely used - remains controversial because of its implications for equity and long-term outcomes. While student-level predictors are well documented, less is known about how school and system characteristics shape grade retention practices across countries. Adopting a multilevel perspective, this study examines (1) which school-level characteristics are related to grade retention in lower-secondary education and (2) whether these relationships vary by national educational stratification. Using PISA 2018 data from 124,126 students in 5,693 schools across 24 systems, we estimate three-level regression models. School composition, within-class ability grouping, and shortages of educational materials are linked to grade retention probability, net of individual characteristics. Cross-level interaction analyses show that educational material shortages predict higher grade retention likelihoods only in low-stratification systems, while the association with within-class ability grouping is substantially lower in these contexts. These findings underscore that grade retention practices are shaped by both institutional structures and school organisation.
The effective use of data for instructional improvement has become a central priority in education, particularly in accountability-driven systems such as Chile's. While organizational enablers and access conditions have been widely studied, less is known about how pedagogical practices shape teachers' engagement with data. This study investigates how three instructional dimensions-evaluation practices, instructional clarity, and cognitive activation-influence teachers' use of data in Chilean primary schools. Drawing on longitudinal survey data from 1,226 responses across 50 schools, we used multilevel analyses to examine the relative contribution of organizational and pedagogical factors. Findings indicate that teachers' practices, rather than organizational supports, are the strongest predictors of instructional data use across school groups. Evaluation practices and instructional clarity are most strongly associated with data use, while cognitive activation shows a positive but weaker effect. These results underscore the need for professional development and leadership strategies that embed data use within everyday pedagogical practice.
Higher teacher expectations are generally linked to higher school engagement and achievement. This study tested whether overestimation could also have negative effects. We examined (curvi)linear associations between teacher expectations (relative to actual achievement) at the start of the school year and students' engagement, achievement, and school performance pressure at year-end. Participants were 716 upper primary school students (Mage = 9.72, 46.5% girls) and 45 teachers. Multilevel analyses showed that teachers tended to overestimate their students' future achievement. Overestimation was greater for boys and higher-SES students at the individual level and, at the class level, in classrooms with more students from minoritized ethnic backgrounds. We mostly found linear associations indicating that overestimation was positively related to engagement and achievement. However, a curvilinear effect emerged indicating that both under- and overestimation were associated with higher performance pressure. Overall, findings suggest that especially underestimation, but also overestimation can have adverse effects on students.
This paper refers to three different ways that are used to measure school effectiveness. Specifically, it refers to school effect by considering a) student achievement-gains (i.e., the quality dimension of effectiveness), b) achievement-gap in terms of students' socioeconomic status (i.e., the equity dimension), and c) the impact of one extra year of schooling on final achievement. Criterion consistency is examined by analysing data on mathematics achievement of all Grade 4-6 students (n = 5520) in 40 Cypriot schools at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Student background factors were also measured. The school effectiveness status which was measured by considering the schooling effect was found to be related to the school effectiveness status measured by considering the quality and/or the equity dimension of effectiveness. The importance of using multiple criteria to measure school effectiveness for formative reasons is discussed. Implications for research, policy and practice are drawn.
In this study, we examined whether differences in teacher expectations for students from different backgrounds related to differentiation in teachers' support for and thwarting of students' psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Data were collected from 62 Dutch primary school teachers and 1,056 students (Grades 4-6) via questionnaires on teacher and student perceived need support and thwarting and teacher expectations, alongside students' standardized test scores in reading and math. Analyses revealed that teachers had lower expectations for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and higher expectations for students from stigmatized ethnic groups compared to other students. Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds also experienced more need-thwarting teaching but not less need support. However, teacher expectations did not mediate the relationship between student background and need support or thwart. Altogether, the findings indicate that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are at greater risk for lower teacher expectations and more perceived need thwarting.
In Chile, School Improvement Plans (SIPs) are mandated by policy. However, research has shown that these plans are often perceived as bureaucratic requirements rather than as meaningful tools for fostering organizational learning. This study explores a complementary approach; short-cycle improvement planning, implemented by 20 schools participating in a two-year, improvement-oriented program (2023-2024). Through qualitative analysis, we examine how school and district leaders compare traditional yearlong approaches to SIPs with short-cycle planning, and how their improvement mindsets evolve in the process. The findings suggest that short-cycle planning fosters greater agility, collaboration, and more authentic engagement with improvement goals; however, not all schools demonstrated deep shifts in improvement mindset. This study makes both practical and theoretical contributions by highlighting the difficulty of changing the improvement mindset at the moment of planning.
While networking for school turnaround has been widely discussed, how networking benefits turnaround schools is underresearched, and research on complex networking approaches' systematic effects on school turnaround is scarce. Referencing Shanghai and Chongqing, China, this qualitative study found six mechanisms through which networking improves turnaround schools: providing multilevel professional guidance, connecting policy requirements and school needs, propelling teachers' self-directed improvement, widening teachers' and students' development opportunities, changing teachers' thinking and practice, and enhancing schools' popularity and reputation. Analyses suggest networking as an extrinsic-intrinsic-oriented facilitation instrument for school turnaround. Specifically, networking by receiving help facilitates turnaround mainly through extrinsic-oriented mechanisms that focus on drawing external investment and impetus; conversely, networking by giving help facilitates turnaround mainly through intrinsic-oriented mechanisms that focus on driving internal comprehension and effort.
We designed both univariate and multivariate multilevel frameworks to examine the issue on the degree of agreement between principals and teachers in their perceptions of three leadership practices (general principal leadership, orientation for school renewal, and school renewal principles and practices). Data involved 2,243 teachers nested within 109 principals (schools) in the United States. We found that both univariate and multivariate approaches produced quite similar measurements (means) on teachers' ratings of each leadership practice. Both approaches confirmed positive and statistically significant agreement between principals and teachers across leadership practices. Analytical discrepancies occurred between univariate and multivariate approaches in the estimation of the degree of agreement between principals and teachers. Methodologically, the multivariate approach is preferred over the univariate approach because the univariate approach tends to overestimate the degree of agreement. Under a methodologically more appropriate multivariate approach, the degree of agreement is quite consistent across leadership practices.
There is an ongoing literacy crisis within the US. One practice that supports reading comprehension growth is the use of student-centered routines. However, teachers often face challenges in integrating them into their instructional contexts. Networked improvement communities (NICs), combining organizational routines of improvement science with the coordinated effort of networks, could help teachers meet this integration challenge. Teachers have found value in NICs, but district leaders are seeking evidence of their impact. To help teachers advocate for this approach, this study analyzes 2 years of student outcome and teacher implementation data in a 13-school US-based NIC that focused teachers on a set of student-centered routines. Students with a higher implementing teacher showed benefits comparable to a typical 2.5 months of learning at the national scale. This study also uses an equity-focused lens to study the impact of instructional change efforts on specific student groups without requiring a formal experimental study.
This paper introduces documentary video analysis (DVA) as a qualitative-reconstructive method for analyzing complex classroom interactions. While DVA is primarily employed to describe instructional phenomena and practices, its absence in identifying aspects of teaching quality constitutes a notable research gap. By incorporating an existing typology related to cognitively activating interactions developed through DVA, this paper aims to reconstruct two Norwegian classroom sessions - one on mathematics and one on Norwegian language arts (L1) - and evaluate them against this typology from a theoretical-normative quality perspective. The findings reveal that DVA can identify various elements, including teachers' confidence in students' abilities, as crucial for cognitively activating instructional interactions. This research underscores DVA's potential to contribute to the discourse on teaching quality, offering insights into the dynamics of teaching and learning environments.
This contribution introduces a comparative Model for characterizing Teaching Quality from the conceptual categories of the Joint Action framework in Didactics (JAD-MTQ). Stemming from French research in comparative didactics, the JAD-MTQ focuses on knowledge content development as a key aspect of teaching quality. This model considers three dimensions of teaching: selection of content and tasks, structure of learning situations, and organization of teacher-student interactions. For each dimension, a set of criteria provides a descriptive assessment of teaching quality. In this paper, the JAD-MTQ is used to rate the quality of two consecutive lessons in two subjects, mathematics and language arts, taught in Grade 8 in Norway. We discuss the uniqueness, benefits, and limitations of the JAD-MTQ. We highlight that JAD-MTQ categories are "subject generic," that is, they can be used for different subjects while still capturing content-specific aspects of teaching and learning related to instructional tasks.
Observation systems are frequently used to capture and improve teaching quality. The standardized observation system that we present in this paper captures four dimensions of teaching quality: classroom management, student support, cognitive activation, and educational structuring. Through the analysis of two videotaped lessons from Norwegian mathematics and language arts classrooms, we demonstrate the strengths and limitations of the observation system in detecting patterns of teaching quality across subjects at different levels of analysis (e.g., segment, item, and dimension level). The results show that, while important aspects of teaching quality are captured across subjects, some adaptations might be necessary to capture the characteristics of language arts classrooms in more detail. We discuss implications for educational research and practice.
In this study, we used the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation (PLATO) tool to examine teaching quality in two consecutive Norwegian language arts lessons and two consecutive mathematics lessons to identify key patterns of teaching quality and how aspects of PLATO shaped findings. Our analyses reveal that the mathematics lessons receive consistently high scores on most PLATO elements while the patterns in the language arts lessons are more mixed of high and low scores fluctuating across different parts of the lessons. On the basis of this analysis, we discuss benefits and challenges with PLATO. A major strength of PLATO is the way aspects of teaching quality are conceptualized and defined at the level of elements, supported by precise and detailed rubrics, while challenges include the way PLATO privileges some instructional formats above others and how sequencing of the lessons into 15-min segments impacts findings and patterns identified.
This special issue investigates how patterns of teaching quality are constructed across different observation frameworks, using a sample of Nordic video-recorded mathematics and language arts lessons as a common ground for analysis. We summarize the differences and similarities across the six frameworks linked to the themes considered in this special issue: (a) purpose and theoretical grounding, (b) the facets of teaching captured, (c) specificity of focus, (d) grain size, and (e) key findings. In the discussion, we elaborate on how these different aspects shape the findings and patterns revealed, pointing to three overarching dilemmas and questions. While the overall findings and conclusions of the six approaches might look similar at first glance, we show in this special issue that the rich and detailed descriptions from different frameworks provide nuances of understanding that are useful for both research and teacher feedback. We encourage others to collaborate across approaches, paradigms, and perspectives.
Research on teacher effectiveness has consistently shown that teaching quality is a primary means for enhancing student learning and outcomes. Improving teaching quality has been a main goal of the educational improvement agenda. The field has witnessed a growing interest in using classroom observation instruments to facilitate the improvement of teaching quality in terms of effective teaching behavior. International Comparative Analysis of Learning and Teaching (ICALT) is a generic, non-subject-specific teaching observation instrument originally developed by the Dutch Inspectorate of Education in cooperation with the Central Inspectorates in several European countries. This research reveals the value of ICALT as a framework for assessing teaching quality, using two video-recorded Norwegian mathematics and language arts lessons as demonstrative materials. Results show that the use of ICALT provides useful information regarding the general quality of the observed individual lessons. General patterns and fine-grained differences between the observed lessons could be identified.
The persistence of teacher effects is a crucial aspect in value-added models, especially when it comes to high-stakes decisions. This study compared various assumptions of persistence (generalized, variable, complete, and zero) regarding their model fit and consistency of estimates. Longitudinal data from assessments in mathematics, science, social sciences, and Turkish subjects were analyzed. Results indicated that the model with the variable persistence assumption demonstrated superior fit in three out of four subjects for teacher value-added score estimates. The correlation between the estimates for models with generalized and variable persistence assumptions was notably high. However, substantial variances were observed in estimates regarding their magnitude and corresponding rank order. The study deliberated on the implications of different persistence assumptions on teacher value-added score estimates.
This study aims to identify school culture profiles based on supportive improvement factors, examine predictors of teachers' profile membership, and explore teachers' perceptions of work and teaching-related aspects of their profession within those profiles. The sample consisted of 2,439 teachers from 78 schools. Latent profile analysis was used to identify distinct school profiles based on improvement-oriented aspects of school culture. The analysis revealed three profiles: high, promising, and low improvement-oriented cultures. A high improvement-oriented culture was associated with greater teacher job satisfaction and perceived impact and enriched teaching practices. Promising and low improvement-oriented cultures were related to lower teacher job satisfaction and perceived impact and more traditional teaching practices. The findings suggest a potential trajectory for school improvement programmes, highlighting the dynamic nature of school cultures.
