Modelling the Effects of Pupil Mobility and Neighbourhood on School Differences in Educational Achievement

George Leckie ()

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from The Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: Traditional studies of school differences in educational achievement use multilevel modelling techniques to take into account the nesting of pupils within schools. However, educational data are known to have more complex non-hierarchical structures. The potential importance of such structures is apparent when considering the impact of pupil mobility during secondary schooling on educational achievement. Movements of pupils between schools suggest that we should model pupils as belonging to the series of schools attended and not just their final school. Since these school moves are strongly linked to residential moves, it is important to additionally explore whether achievement is also affected by the history of neighbourhoods lived in. Using the national pupil database (NPD), this paper combines multiple-membership and cross-classified multilevel models to simultaneously explore the relationships between secondary school, primary school, neighbourhood and educational achievement. The results show a negative relationship between pupil mobility and achievement, the strength of which depends greatly on the nature and timing of these moves. Accounting for pupil mobility also reveals that schools and neighbourhoods are more important than shown by previous analysis. A strong primary school effect appears to last long after a child has left that phase of schooling. The additional impact of neighbourhoods, on the other hand, is small. Crucially, the rank order of school effects across all types of pupils is sensitive to whether we account for the complexity of the multilevel data structure.

Keywords: Cross-classified models; Multiple-membership-models; Multilevel modelling; Pupil mobility; School effectiveness; Value-added models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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