The relationship between distributed leadership, enabling school structure, teacher collaboration, academic optimism and student achievement: A school effectiveness model

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Eğitim Fakültesi, Eğitim Bilimleri Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2016

Öğrenci: YUSUF İKBAL OLDAÇ

Danışman: YAŞAR KONDAKÇI

Özet:

The purpose of this study was to test a school effectiveness model investigating the relationship between student achievement and a set of school-level variables including distributed leadership, enabling school structure, teacher collaboration, and academic optimism. The data for this study were collected from schools located in 3 districts of Adana, Turkey. The sample consisted of 23053 students and 426 teachers from randomly selected 40 public schools. For the purposes of this study, Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis was conducted using HLM7 software. HLM accounted for the multilevel nature of the data by nesting student level data to school level. HLM results revealed that collective efficacy dimension of academic optimism had the strongest relationship with student achievement differences between schools. Further, trust in clients and hindering bureaucracy had significant relationship with between-school variation in student achievement, too. On the contrary, distributed leadership, teacher collaboration, enabling bureaucracy, and academic emphasis did not significantly relate to across-school differences in student achievement. The proposed HLM model explained 60.5% of the between-school variation in student achievement and thus, decreased the unexplained between-school variation among total variation to 7.44%. Overall, the results suggested that more attention on teachers’ belief in themselves that they can make a difference is necessary. Also, school-family relationships could be important in increasing student achievement as faculty trust in clients was found to be an important factor. Further, concepts such as academic optimism and hindering bureaucracy may need some revision especially for their validity in highly centralized schooling systems such as Turkey’s.