The impact of Educational Resources on Junior High School Student Achievement in Taiwan Rural and Non-rural Area

Abstract

The Coleman Report in 1966 triggers the debate over whether family effects are larger than school effects on student achievement. The following researches find that the impact of school on student achievement is mysterious and inconsistent. If the relationship between the school and student achievement can’t be confirmed, how could the government spend so much money on education? In this study, we try to use different ways to investigate the relationship. The effects are divided into resource and investment. Different from past researches which mixed resource and investment, the resources are defined as something that can purchase objects and the characteristics that schools and family have, like the percentage of non-low-income student and parent education. These resources can let school and parent invest more items in students. We gather the investment indicators mainly from the PISA and TIMSS which are the most famous international education surveys. Besides, the meetings are hold to collect the indicators matching the contexts in Taiwan. There are 16 family investment indicators which can be classified as learning objects, learning environment, after-school program and parent involvement. There are 20 school investment indicators which can be classified as activities to improve teaching, teaching facilities, and activities to improve learning. In order to take individual and school variances into consideration and estimate the effects of school level and family level on student achievement, the Hierarchical linear Model (HLM) was used for analysis. Due to the large differences between rural and non-rural schools, we separate estimates of two-level models within two kinds of schools to compare their coefficients of different variables.