Schoolbeleid, instructie en leerresultaten

In the field of educational research, a lot of attention has been paid to school effectiveness in recent years. The purpose of that research has been to establish whether there are structural differences between schools in achievement and student attitudes, and if so, what conditions at school level this can be ascribed to. The volume of research has lead to an awareness of what the school-level factors affecting student achievement are. There is still considerable uncertainty, however. This uncertainty is partly the result of a lack of causal relations explaining how school factors affect the achievement of students. The school factors influencing student achievement are therefore known, but not how they affect that achievement. This study will try to give an answer to the question whether conditions at school level affect activities in the classroom, and how these activities influence student achievement, or at least whether there is indeed a direct effect of those school level conditions on achievement. The main question of the research described here is the extent to which the effect of conditions at school level on achievement is direct or indirect. The results are of importance for the developing of school effectiveness models in which causal relations between conditions at school and classroom level and achievement can be made.