School Effects, Gender and Socioeconomic Differences in Reading Performance: A Multilevel Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of Albanian secondary schools, which are associated with reading achievement and the effects of gender and socio-economic status on reading performance of 15-year-old students. This study used data on the background and achievement of 4,596 students in 181 Albanian schools from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Given the nested structure of the data, two-level Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) methods were used to address multilevel research questions. About a third of the total variance in reading performance lies between schools, indicating that school characteristics are important in predicting student achievement. The results clearly reveal the significant relationships of socio-economic status (SES) and gender with student achievement, even after controlling for family structure (two parent families versus others), learning strategies use, and reading engagement. There is also a substantial variability among schools on gender difference in student performance and the effect of SES on student performance. The results from the between-school model suggest that school type, school SES and classroom environment are significant predictors of school performance. Moreover, gender gap in reading performance is associated with school sector (public/private), school location (urban/rural), and average reading engagement; and SES effect on student performance is associated with school type (general/vocational), school location and average reading engagement. The characteristics of schools that make them excellent and more equitable are summarized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".