Schools’ Emphasis on Academic Success in TIMSS 2015 across Finland, Singapore, and Turkey

Abstract

School climate which is strongly related with the students’ outcomes includes some of the components, among 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. In disciplined schools, more opportunities are found to focus on learning and teaching. So, in these schools, there is a tendency of placing the academic success to the priority. 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, 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 by scrutinizing the 4th grade teachers’ responses in TIMSS 2015 for 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 aforementioned 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 the three countries.

Keywords

• School emphasis on academic success
• safe and orderly schools
• TIMSS 2015
• multiple logistic regression

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