Students' and schools' expectancy-value beliefs are associated with reading achievement: A cross-cultural study

Students' expectancy and value beliefs are critical to reading achievement. However, past studies have predominantly focused on these constructs at the student level. Whether and how school-level expectancy-value beliefs—defined as the expectancy and value beliefs of one's schoolmates—are associated with students' reading achievement has seldom been examined. This study aimed to investigate the relationships among student-level and school-level expectancy-value beliefs and their reading achievement. Furthermore, we examined whether these relationships generalized across cultures. The doubly-latent multilevel structural equation modeling method was adopted. The sample came from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data with 103,627 15-year-old students from Eastern (Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan) and Western (USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) cultures. The relationships among the variables varied across cultures. In the East, both student-level and school-level expectancy-value beliefs were associated with better reading achievement. However, in the West, students' reading achievement was only significantly tied to student-level but not to school-level expectancy and value beliefs. The association between student-level expectancy-value beliefs and reading achievement was stronger in the West than in the East. This study highlighted the importance of taking both student-level and school-level expectancy value beliefs into account as well as the need to consider cultural differences. These findings have important implications for recent work highlighting the situated nature of expectancy and value beliefs. •Students’ reading achievement was positively related to the expectancy and value beliefs of themselves and the schoolmates surrounding them.•The relationships among the variables varied across cultures.•School-level expectancy and value beliefs were stronger predictors of students’ reading achievement in the East, whereas student-level expectancy and value beliefs were stronger predictors of students’ reading achievement in the West.