Looking for clues. Associations between teacher, classroom, and school characteristics and students' cognitive outcomes in primary education in Flanders

The field of educational effectiveness research (EER) is traditionally about investigating teacher, classroom, and school characteristics that-directly or indirectly-explain variation in the outcomes of students. The present dissertation consists of four theory-driven manuscripts within the field of EER, connected by their common focus on mathematics and language outcomes in primary education as well as by the fact that all studies used data from the large-scale longitudinal SiBO Project in Flanders. The general question is whether teachers and schools make a difference to student achievement and if so, how.Manuscript 1 is based on the comprehensive multilevel framework of Palardy and Rumberger (2008) and aims to investigate the effects of teachers background qualifications, their attitudes and beliefs, and the instructional practices of teachers on student achievement in first grade. Results showed that teachers made a difference to student achievement and teacher effects depended upon the learning domain under scrutiny, with larger effects found for mathematics than for reading fluency and spelling. Moreover, teachers background was most important to mathematics, whereas instructional practices teachers use were most important to reading fluency and spelling.In Manuscript 2, the focus is on the association between the composition of schools in terms of prior achievement, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, and mathematics achievement at the end of second grade. Additionally, we aimed at testing one potential explanation for the school composition effect proposed by Harker and Tymms (2004) by investigating whether school processes mediate these associations. No direct school composition effects were found, after controlling for students math achievement at the onset of primary education, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, age, school well-being, and self-directedness. The results pointed at two small differential school composition effects, and two small indirect effects via the school process variable keeping in regular contact with parents . This seems to indicate that, in general, school composition hardly matters in the early years of primary education.In Manuscript 3, the model of academic optimism a higher order construct composed of academic emphasis, collective efficacy, and faculty trust in students and parents developed by Hoy, Tarter, and Woolfolk Hoy (2006a, 2006b), was thoroughly examined. Contrary to the first two manuscripts wher