Classroom disciplinary climate of schools and gender – evidence from the Nordic countries

ABSTRACT

Classroom disciplinary climate has emerged as a crucial factor with regard to student achievement. However, most previous studies have not explored potential gender differences in both students’ perceptions of the classroom disciplinary climate and the association between classroom disciplinary climate and student learning. Using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 for the Nordic countries, we found a significant association between the perceived classroom disciplinary climate of schools and students’ mathematics performance across countries. On the basis of an analysis of a pooled sample consisting of all 5 Nordic countries, we found that the correlation between classroom disciplinary climate of schools and maths achievement is significantly stronger for boys than for girls. Further analyses showed that this finding may partly be attributable to gender differences in the perception of the disciplinary climate of schools, whereby boys seemed to perceive the classroom disciplinary climate of schools more positively than girls.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom disciplinary climate of schools
• student perceptions
• mathematics
• PISA
• gender differences

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Felix Weiss for valuabe comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It should be mentioned, however, that Husain and Millimet (2009) have disputed that there is a sizable difference between boys’ and girls’ academic achievement in the United States.

2. As a consequence of PISA’s sampling procedure (see section on data), perceptions of the classroom climate can only be aggregated at the level of schools. While classroom-level analyses would be preferable, we argue that schools share a common culture as well as other characteristics which allow for reliable school-level analyses (also see Ning et al., 2015, p. 18). The school-level intra-class correlations ICC(1) further support this assumption (from .08 in Finland to .17 in Iceland).

3. Available in the 2000, 2003, 2009, 2012, and 2015 cycles of PISA.

4. According to the Human Development Index, all five countries were among the top 24 most developed societies in 2012 (United Nations Development Programme, 2014).

5. 155 schools (958 observations) were dropped due to school samples with less than 10 observations. An additional 11 schools (112 observations) had to be excluded because fewer than 10 students had provided answers to the classroom disciplinary climate items.

6. We conducted principal component factor analyses in STATA 14.2 for each gender and each country separately to test whether the CDS scale performed equally well for the male and female samples and for each of the five Nordic countries. Factor loadings for each of the five items were almost identical across genders and countries.

7. Weighted student participation rates after replacement are: Denmark 96%, Finland 99%, Iceland 99%, Norway 95%, and Sweden 99% (OECD, 2014, p. 186).

8. Missing values: SES: 85, country of birth: 77, language spoken at home: 545, and urban and school type: 441 (due to 33 school leaders who did not complete the school questionnaire).

9. There are only very few exceptions from this assumption in our data.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Danish Council for Strategic ResearchThis work was partly supported by the Danish Council for Strategic Research #10-093105.

Notes on contributors

Bent Sortkær

Bent Sortkær is a PhD student in a joint programme between the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, and VIA University College, Aarhus. His research focuses on learning environments and classroom practices and their impact on educational attainment.

David Reimer

David Reimer is Professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. His research focus is on social stratification, with a focus on inequalities in education across class, gender, and ethnic divides. Most of his work has a cross-country comparative perspective. His work has appeared in various international journals such as European Sociological Review, Higher Education, Social Science Research, and International Journal of Comparative Sociology.