Open AccessThe school effect on mathematics performance in PISA 2012: A comparison between two cantons in Switzerland
Author(s) -
Alice Ambrosetti,
Franck Petrucci,
Sandra Fenaroli,
Michele Egloff
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
schweizerische zeitschrift für bildungswissenschaften
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2624-8492
pISSN - 1424-3946
DOI - 10.24452/sjer.44.1.7
Subject(s) - seniority , variance (accounting) , context (archaeology) , mathematics education , test (biology) , psychology , academic achievement , student achievement , class (philosophy) , political science , geography , computer science , biology , paleontology , accounting , archaeology , law , business , artificial intelligence
Through this research, we explored the relationship between student achievement and school environment. We compared mathematics scores from the PISA test in Ticino and Geneva. We discovered that in both cantons there is a significant but moderate school effect on student mathematics performance (around 7% of the variance is attributable to school affiliation). Based on our results, we rejected the hypothesis that the context effect was a social and/or academic compositional one. We identified other factors, related to the teaching staff (seniority) and to the organization (class size), which may partly explain the between-school variance. However, we did not identify a systematic effect, since none of the variables analyzed were found to be statistically significant in both cantons.