The Mediating Effect of Creativity on the Relationship Between Mathematic Achievement and Programming Self-Efficacy

Purpose: This study aimed to explore the relationship between mathematic achievement and programming self-efficacy, and adopt a mediation model to verify the mediating role of creativity on the relationship between mathematic achievement and programming self-efficacy.Methods: A total of 950 upper-secondary school students were surveyed using their math test scores, the Kirton Adaption-Innovation and the Programmed Self-Efficacy Scale. SPSS-26 was used for descriptive statistical analysis and correlation analysis of related variables. The PROCESS plugin was used to test the mediating effect of creativity.Results: (1) Mathematic achievement has a positive effect on programming self-efficacy, mathematic achievement is positively related to creativity, and creativity also has a positive influence on programming self-efficacy. (2) Creativity has a mediating effect on the relationship between mathematic achievement and programming self-efficacy.Conclusion: The results revealed that mathematic achievement affected programming self-efficacy directly and also indirectly through creativity. This provided certain ideas for the development of programming education for teenagers. Since students’ mathematics learning and creativity are related to programming learning, it is necessary to pay attention to the integration of the disciplines of programming education and mathematics. Further, the cultivation of innovative thinking is also critical to facilitate programming learning.

Smartphone Use and Academic Performance: A Pervasiveness Approach Beyond Addiction

Over the past decade, smartphones have permeated all domains of adolescents’ everyday lives, with research dominated by “smartphone addiction.” This study compares one of the most used measures of smartphone addiction with a new alternative measure, the Smartphone Pervasiveness Scale for Adolescents (SPS-A), which focuses on the frequency of smartphone use at key social and physiological moments of daily life. A sample of 3,289 Italian high school students was used to validate the two constructs and compare their suitability for research on academic performance. SPS-A was moderately correlated with smartphone addiction, showed measurement invariance (across ethnic origins, parental education, and gender), and negatively predicted language and math test scores. SPS-A is a nonpathologizing instrument suitable for analyzing the role of smartphone use in academic achievement in combination with students’ social backgrounds.

Diverging Disparities: Race, Parental Income, and Children’s Math Scores, 1960 to 2009

In recent decades, the black–white test score disparity has decreased, and the test score disparity between children of high- versus low-income parents has increased. This study focuses on a comparison that has, to date, fallen between the separate literatures on these diverging trends: black and white students whose parents have similarly low, middle, or high incomes (i.e., same income or race within income). To do so, I draw on three nationally representative data sets on 9th or 10th graders, covering 1960 to 2009, that contain information on students’ math test scores. I find that math test score disparities between black and white students with same-income parents are to black students’ disadvantage. Although these disparities have decreased since 1960, in 2009 they remained substantively large, statistically significant, and largest between children of the highest-income parents. Furthermore, family and school characteristics that scholars commonly use to explain test score disparities by race or income account for markedly decreasing shares of race-within-income disparities over time. The study integrates the literatures on test score disparities by race and income with attention to the historical and continued structural influence of race, net of parental income, on students’ educational experiences and test score outcomes.

Migrant Concentration in Schools and Students’ Performance: Does It Matter When Migrants Speak the Same Language as Nonmigrant Students?

A negative correlation between schools’ migrant share and students’ educational outcomes has been described in multiple contexts, including Spain. In this article, we concentrate on testing the implications of one of the main mechanisms explaining this relationship, which pays attention to the share of migrants who are not proficient in the language of instruction. Spain represents an interesting case due to the significant presence of migrants born in Latin American countries, who are Spanish native speakers. By exploiting the different shares of Spanish-speaking and non-Spanish-speaking migrants across schools in Spain, we are able to test whether the share of non-Spanish native speakers (rather than the share of migrant students) affects students’ test scores in math. Our results show that the concentration of non–Latin American migrant students is significantly and negatively associated with students’ math test scores, although the effect is very small.

Pengaruh Kecemasan Matematika Siswa Kelas VII Terhadap Hasil Belajar Di SMP Negeri 3 Kota Bengkulu

This research is a study that discusses the influence of mathematics on grade VII students—learning outcomes at SMP NEGERI 3 Kota Bengkulu. This study's population was all students of class VII SMP NEGERI 3 Bengkulu City, which consisted of 130 famous students in 5 classes. Samples were taken using the random sampling technique. Then, a sample of class VII.2 was chosen, possibly 20 students. This study using a questionnaire and documentation. The data were obtained using a questionnaire, while the documentation in this study was used to obtain learning data obtained from teacher data in the form of daily math test scores. In the research analysis, prerequisite tests were used, such as the normality test, linearity test, and product moment test with SPSS version 22. The analysis results obtained a value of 0.754, which indicates that the relationship's level is healthy between the two variables. There is a positive sign indicating that the property is valuable. Positive and unidirectional. The results of the analysis using Pearson products when the significance value was obtained 0.000. The results of this study indicate that there is a significant relationship between the effect of mathematics on learning outcomes at SMP NEGERI 3 Kota Bengkulu.Keywords: Mathematics anxiety, learning outcomes

Impact of Contextual Predictors on Value-Added Teacher Effectiveness Estimates

It is widely believed that the teacher is one of the most important factors influencing a student’s success at school. In many countries, teachers’ salaries and promotion prospects are determined by their students’ performance. Value-added models (VAMs) are increasingly used to measure teacher effectiveness to reward or penalize teachers. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between teacher effectiveness and student academic performance, controlling for other contextual factors, such as student and school characteristics. The data are based on 7543 Grade 8 students matched with 230 teachers from one province in Turkey. To test how much progress in student academic achievement can be attributed to a teacher, a series of regression analyses were run including contextual predictors at the student, school and teacher/classroom level. The results show that approximately half of the differences in students’ math test scores can be explained by their prior attainment alone (47%). Other factors, such as teacher and school characteristics explain very little the variance in students’ test scores once the prior attainment is taken into account. This suggests that teachers add little to students’ later performance. The implication, therefore, is that any intervention to improve students’ achievement should be introduced much earlier in their school life. However, this does not mean that teachers are not important. Teachers are key to schools and student learning, even if they are not differentially effective from each other in the local (or any) school system. Therefore, systems that attempt to differentiate “effective” from “ineffective” teachers may not be fair to some teachers.

Direct and Indirect Effects under Sample Selection and Outcome Attrition

This paper extends the evaluation of direct and indirect treatment effects, i.e., mediation analysis, to the case that outcomes are only partially observed due to sample selection or outcome attrition. We assume sequential conditional independence of the treatment and the mediator, i.e., the variable through which the indirect effect operates. We also impose missing at random or instrumental variable assumptions on the outcome attrition process. Under these conditions, we derive identification results for the effects of interest that are based on inverse probability weighting by specific treatment, mediator, and/or selection propensity scores. We also provide a simulation study and an empirical application to the U.S. Project STAR data in which we assess the direct impact and indirect effect (via absenteeism) of smaller kindergarten classes on math test scores. The estimators considered are available in the ‘causalweight’ package for the statistical software ‘R’.

Diverging Disparities: Race, Parental Income, and Children's Math Scores, 1960-2009

In recent decades, the Black-White test score disparity has decreased, while the test score disparity between children of high- versus low-income parents has increased. This study focuses on a comparison that has, to date, fallen between the separate literatures on these diverging trends – Black and White students whose parents have similarly low, middle, or high incomes (i.e., same-income or race-within-income). To do so, I draw on three nationally representative datasets on ninth or tenth graders, covering the period from 1960 to 2009, all of which contain information on students’ math test scores. I find that math test score disparities between Black and White students with same-income parents are to Blacks’ disadvantage. Although these disparities have decreased since 1960, in 2009, they remain substantively large, statistically significant, and largest between children of the highest income parents. Further, family and school characteristics that scholars commonly use to explain test score disparities by race or by income have accounted for markedly decreasing shares of race-within-income disparities over time. The study integrates the literatures on test score disparities by race and by income with needed attention to race’s historical and continued structural influence, net of parental income, on students’ educational experiences and test score outcomes.

Developing Ambitious Mathematics Instruction Through Web-Based Coaching: A Randomized Field Trial

This article describes and evaluates a web-based coaching program designed to support teachers in implementing Common Core–aligned math instruction. Web-based coaching programs can be operated at relatively lower costs, are scalable, and make it more feasible to pair teachers with coaches who have expertise in their content area and grade level. Results from our randomized field trial document sizable and sustained effects on both teachers’ ability to analyze instruction and on their instructional practice, as measured by the Mathematical Quality of Instruction instrument and student surveys. However, these improvements in instruction did not result in corresponding increases in math test scores as measured by state standardized tests or interim assessments. We discuss several possible explanations for this pattern of results.

A comparative analysis of children’s time use and educational achievement: Assessing evidence from China, Japan and the United States

Various forms of empirical evidence suggest that parental socioeconomic status (SES) is strongly related to educational outcomes and many countries attempt to close achievement gaps among children. Parenting practice is one important mechanism through which educational inequality emerges across families with different SES. In this paper, we show that the class gap in children’s time use and academic achievements reflects parenting styles and parental practices stratified by parental SES by comparatively investigating the cases of China, Japan, and the USA, drawing on three sets of nationally representative longitudinal data. We find that for children aged 10–15 in China, parental SES has a strong impact on children's homework time and academic performance. Similar patterns are found in the results of 10–15-year-old children in Japan; however, homework time more weakly relates to the parents' education level. Moreover, restricting the samples to 14-year-old children and comparing the three countries, we find that the test score gap among parental SES is the largest in the USA; to fill the gap in math test scores between the first and fourth income quartiles, a sizable number of additional hours spent on homework are needed in the USA, compared to China and Japan.