The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating effect of academic self-efficacy on the relationship between middle school students' perceptions of teaching competencies and math achievement. This study was based on the GEPS and used multi-level SEM to capture the hierarchical structure of the clustered data. Considering the limitations of previous empirical studies using SEM methodology to control the influences of confounding variables, this study included student and school-level covariates. Through model comparisons between two models: a model without covariates and the other model with both student and school-level covariates, the final research model was applied to analyze the effects of perceived teaching competencies and academic self-efficacy on academic achievement. The study yielded a number of interesting results. Firstly, after controlling for student and school-level variables, the direct effect of perceived teaching competencies on academic achievement was shown to be statistically significant. The indirect effect, or the mediating influence of academic self-efficacy, was also * This study is a revised version of presentation which was presented in 2016 ICER.

The purpose of this study is to explore the variables that have a major impact on the classifying of groups by reading literacy level. To research the study, the groups were divided to the general group and the below basic literacy level group by reading literacy level and the random forest was used to explore the main variables to classify the group by reading literacy level. And the subjects of this study were the 6,630 students in the 168 schools who participated in PISA 2018 and the 286 variables of student, parents, teacher, and school were used for analysis. As a result, the variables of student were found to play a major role in classifying students into the general group rather than the below basic literacy level group. Specifically, the group classification was influenced by the variables related to the various reading strategies, the experiences, frequency and cognition of reading activities, and the difficulty or effort of the PISA testing or survey. Also, other variables related to individual and family backgrounds affected the classification of groups.In addition, by using the random forest, this research confirmed the nonlinear relationship between group classification and affecting variables, taking into account complex relationships among variables. Based on these results, this study suggested the educational supports needed to improve the students' reading literacy.

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