School Climate, Student Engagement, and Academic Achievement: A Latent Variable, Multilevel Multi-Informant Examination

• NCJ Number: 252498
• Date Published: November 2018
• Author(s): Tim Konold, Dewey Cornell, Yuane Jia, Marisa Malone
• Agencies: OJJDP-Sponsored
• Award: Development of a Standard Model for School Safety Assessment

Annotation

This study tested the authoritative school-climate theory that schools characterized by high structure and student support have greater levels of student engagement and that these factors are linked with higher academic achievement, as measured by school graduation rates and school performance on state-mandated testing.

Abstract

Consistent with the authoritative school climate model, both structure and student support were associated with higher student engagement in schools. Moreover, student engagement was directly associated with academic achievement and operated as an intervening factor. These results provide new evidence that an authoritative school climate is associated with high school academic achievement. This model was tested with a multi-level, multi-informant structural model on a statewide sample of 60,441 students and 11,442 teachers in 208 high schools. 93 references (Publisher abstract modified)