Class-average achievement and individual achievement development: Testing achievement composition and peer spillover effects using five German longitudinal studies.

Abstract

In recent studies, the existence and relevance of achievement composition effects on students' individual achievement have been called into question because of the methodological challenges arising in multilevel analyses. Our study examined how class-average achievement is related to students' achievement development across one school year. We used data from Germany, which has a secondary school system with large achievement differences between schools and classrooms due to rigid, explicit betweenschool tracking practices. We accounted for two methodological challenges, controlling for both selection bias and measurement error. Adopting an approach based on integrative data analysis (IDA), we systematically (re)analyzed five German longitudinal large-scale data sets. This IDA approach allowed us to quantify the extent to which results vary across (a) different longitudinal data sets and (b) different analytical strategies (i.e., ways of accounting for confounding variables and measurement reliability). Overall, we found both general achievement composition effects and narrower peer spillover effects (i.e., effects of student composition above and beyond the effects of tracking) in the German setting, even after controlling for measurement error and selection bias. Our results counter recent suggestions that composition effects on achievement development may be mere phantom effects due to methodological misspecifications. However, estimates of composition effects varied substantially based on the analytical approach. We conclude with considerations regarding how to interpret composition effects in multilevel modeling and which effects are of interest for educational research. Educational Impact and Implications StatementThe study investigates whether students experience better achievement development when they have high-achieving classmates, an effect that is known as the achievement composition effect. This question has been controversial in the literature, and several researchers who used a new analytical strategy to analyze compositional effects have recently suggested that achievement composition effects may be mere "phantom effects," meaning that being in a classroom with higher-achieving peers may not have any beneficial effect on students' achievement development or may even have detrimental effects on it. We (re)analyzed five longitudinal studies from Germany, which allowed us to examine the extent to which results varied across studies using different longitudinal data sets and different analytical strategies. Overall, we found positive achievement composition effects. However, they differed based on the analytical strategies used and how they operationalized the effect. The results support the argument that being surrounded by higher-achieving peers can be beneficial for students' learning gains and, at the same time, being surrounded by lower-achieving peers may negatively affect students' learning gains.

Instructional support in inquiry-based elementary school science classes: how does it relate to students’ science content knowledge and academic language proficiency?

“…Thus, students whose classmates had, on average, higher language proficiency concerning general academic vocabulary and comprehension of connectives at the beginning of the school year showed larger learning gains over time. On the one hand, this finding adds to a large body of research that provided evidence for compositional effects for different age groups and domains, including language proficiency (e.g., Becker et al, 2022;Foster et al, 2020;Hanushek et al, 2003;Schmerse, 2021). On the other hand, it extends prior research on inquiry-based science instruction, which typically did not adhere to compositional effects.…”

“…Moreover, student achievement is related to characteristics of the classroom composition. Thus, students typically show larger learning gains when they are grouped with high-achieving students (Becker et al, 2022;Schmerse, 2021) or with students from families with high socioeconomic status (SES; Rjosk et al, 2014;van Ewijk & Sleegers, 2010). Classroom characteristics are, in turn, associated with instructional processes (Fauth et al, 2021;Kuger et al, 2016;Rjosk et al, 2014).…”

Individually endorsed and socially shared normative beliefs on acculturation: Resources and risk factors for academic and psychosocial adjustment in mid-adolescence.

“…The distribution of individual beliefs at the aggregate level is conceptualized as an indicator of the institutional diversity culture. These contextual effects, also termed composition effects, are currently the subject of intense discussion (Becker et al, 2021; Harker & Tymms, 2004). In the following, we outline findings from each of the three approaches to the study of institutional acculturation norms.…”

Hübner, Fahrbach, Lachner, & Scherer (2022). What predicts students’ future ICT literacy?

“…As outlined above, the latter finding might constitute a ceiling effect: Students in schools with a higher than average ICT performance in Grade 9 seem to improve less than students in schools with a lower than average prior ICT performance. Findings on effects of the class or school-related achievement composition on the development of students' achievement have been mixed, with some studies suggesting positive effects (Becker et al, 2022;Stäbler et al, 2017) but others suggesting zero or negative effects (Dicke et al, 2018;Televantou et al, 2021). Notably, most of these studies have considered math or language achievement, and we are not aware of any studies that have considered ICT literacy in this context.…”

“…In one of these studies, Göllner et al (2018) found that the average level of socioeconomic background at a school was positively associated with educational attainment and expectations as well as income and occupational prestige 11 years later. Furthermore, Becker et al (2022) found support for the positive effects of achievementrelated peer composition, over and above tracking effects, suggesting that students' learning progress might benefit from being surrounded by peers with a higher average level of performance. Other prior studies on this topic have found zero or even negative associations between school composition and student achievement (Dicke et al, 2018).…”