| Stephen Plank
Johns Hopkins University
Student behavior and school organization: Cross-national analysis of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study data
This project will use Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data for 13-year-olds and their schools in approximately 20 countries to explore survey responses from principals, teachers, and students on issues of student behavior and discipline. This will fundamentally an exploratory analysis to discover whether variation within and between countries in student behavior is systematically linked to variation in a set of school organizational characteristics. These characteristics include class size, school size, grade span served, reported scarcity of resources, disciplinary policies, and admission criteria. Contextual factors such as a school's socioeconomic composition and status as urban, suburban, or rural will also be considered. Descriptive statistics and hierarchical linear models (HLM) will be employed. Extreme caution will be used in invoking causal language as conclusions are drawn. The primary goals of this project are to detect noteworthy correlations and associations and to highlight similarities and differences between countries.
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