Development of Low-stakes Mathematics and Literacy Test Scores during Lower Secondary School – A Multilevel Pattern-Centered Analysis of Student and Classroom Differences

Publication date: Available online 13 July 2019Source: Contemporary Educational PsychologyAuthor(s): Elina E. Ketonen, Risto HotulainenAbstractThe development of students’ learning and test-taking behavior may derive from the social context and the group of peers they associate with daily for years. Consequently, it is assumed that students’ academic achievements are to some degree affected by their classmates and the composition of the classroom. The present study provides evidence on how Finnish students (N=5071) from different classrooms (N=435) develop distinct patterns regarding their mathematics and literacy achievement during lower secondary school. We analysed longitudinal large-scale educational assessment data using a multilevel latent profile analysis (MLPA) to investigate the impact of classroom effect on students’ achievement patterns, that is, on the development of students’ low-stakes mathematics and literacy test scores from 7th to 9th grade. The results demonstrated the added value of modelling the multilevel structure inherent in educational assessment data: we identified four student achievement patterns that displayed different distributions across the school classes. More precisely, besides individual characteristics, the development of students’ low-stakes mathematics and literacy test scores was associated with class-level factors and some of the classrooms seemed to have a stronger effect on students’ test scores. These results suggest that...
Source: Contemporary Educational Psychology - Category: Child Development Source Type: research