Factors Influencing School Effectiveness in Spain. A Secondary Analysis of PISA 2018

We present below a study on the factors influencing school effectiveness in Spanish schools that participated in the 2018 edition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We understand school effectiveness as those good practices that schools carry out to achieve higher academic performance than expected based on their contextual characteristics. To detect these factors, a secondary analysis of the results of the PISA test was carried out in three main phases. The first one consisted of detecting the factors associated with students’ academic performance in the three main competencies measured in PISA by applying multilevel models. The second phase consisted of identifying high and low effectiveness schools by generating a new “school effectiveness” variable. Finally, to detect the factors related to this variable, we differentiated two new stages. Firstly, using Pearson’s correlation, a series of variables (at school, student, and teacher level) were related to the results obtained by the schools in each of the basic competencies studied in PISA. Then, those variables that showed a significant correlation in the three competences were included in a binary logistic regression with the variable “school effectiveness”. The results indicated that there was a relationship between teacher’s use of specific ICT applications, and students’ “Meta-cognition: summarizing”, “Meta-cognition: assess credibility” and “Self-concept of reading: Perception of difficulty” and “school effectiveness”.