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

Year 2020, Volume: 7 Issue: 4, 203 - 212, 28.09.2020

Eren Ceylan Mustafa Sever

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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