Schools in a Cross-Cultural Context: Schools are More Important for Student Self-Efficacy in Tighter Cultures

초록

Schools shape students' social-psychological development, and such influence could vary across cultures. This paper calls for scholarly attention to the relative importance of the school environment in students' self-efficacy as it varies across cultures, above and beyond direct school characteristics on which prior research has heavily focused. We propose using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) as a proxy measure for the relative importance of school clustering in understanding student outcomes. Our suggestion departs from conventional approaches that consider ICCs as merely a technical tool for the employment of multilevel modeling. By analyzing a sample from the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data for 15-year-old students from 40 countries (n = 308,937; 51% female), we calculate the ICCs using multilevel modeling of student self-efficacy and examine their associations with cultural tightness indices. Demonstrating a positive association between cultural tightness and the ICCs, our findings suggest that school environments are more important for student self-efficacy in countries with tighter cultures than in countries with looser cultures. Our study contributes to the social psychology of education by demonstrating a novel application of the ICCs for investigating cross-cultural differences in school effects on students' psychological development.

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