| Thomas Nix
University of Alabama
Comparison of low, moderate, and high effectiveness schools: A value-added longitudinal assessment of consistent school effectiveness in American suburban, secondary public schools
FINAL REPORT:
The purpose of this study was to assess the literature on school effectiveness in an effort to identify a theoretical base for the study, to identify factors that would represent the theory, and to locate a secondary national database that could be used to model school effectiveness in urban, suburban and rural urbanicities. John Carroll's 1963 model of school learning was identified as the theoretical model of school learning. The wealth of research literature and commentary on school effectiveness provided explanations of variables that could represent the school-related factors in Carroll's model. The National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, a longitudinal study of secondary schools, was used as the national database for the study. Principal components analysis and a two-level hierarchical linear-model were used to analyze the influence of Carroll's school-related factors on academic learning.
Carroll's model specified five-factors that influenced learning. However, only two of the factors could be impacted by school-level activities. These two-factors, opportunity to learn (OTL), and quality of instruction (QOI), and their impact of mathematics achievement in American secondary schools were the focus of this study. The study found that overall the two factors in Carroll's model when combined with SES and locus-of-control covariates had a significant impact on math achievement. Contrary to prior research, there were no differences between urbanicities. However, this finding could be due to the limitations of the dataset used in the study.
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