Explaining School Performance in Literature: Some Strategies of Causal Analysis

Bulcock, J. W. & Finn, J. D., 1975. Explaining School Performance in Literature: Some Strategies of Causal Analyses. Scand. J. educ. Res. 19, 75–110. This paper focuses on the cultural and personality resources of individuals and their school related skills as determinants of achievement in mother tongue literature. A path analytic approach is used to test a popular model of literature achievement which is applied to a subsample of Swedish 14-year-olds selected from the data bank archive of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, University of Stockholm. Because the sex of the student and the amount of effort expended on school work account for variance in levels of performance over-and-above the causally interrelated system factors, it is necessary to control for the possibility of their confounding influence. Accordingly, a ‘pooling’ procedure is used for adjusting the correlation matrix in order to account for the bias in the regression model which is attributable to these factors. The logic of this procedure is developed in the appendix.