Examining the Direct and Indirect Effects of Principal Leadership in Elementary School Students’ Science Achievement

• In Event: School Leadership for Innovation

Abstract

Purpose:
This study explores students’ science achievement trajectories from kindergarten through fifth grade as well as the mediating effects of school leadership via teacher’s self-efficacy. Prior research has suggested that school leadership affects students’ learning outcomes (Antoniou, 2013; OECD, 2008), but little research has looked at students’ performance in science. In addition, there is much still to learn about how school leadership operates in relation to teachers’ self-efficacy and science instructional practices in predicting children’s science achievement utilizing a longitudinal design (see Wu et al., 2020).
Theoretical framework:
When conceptualizing this study, I drew on the bioecological model that situates children’s development in the epicenter of family, neighborhood, and school (Bronfenbrenner, 1992) and on the model consisting of four distinct paths along which leadership influence flows to improve student learning – rational, emotions, organizational, and family paths (see Leithwood et al., 2020). The Four Paths model postulates that leaders increase student learning by improving the condition or status of the selected variables on the Paths, such as teachers’ self-efficacy and instructional practices (Özdemir et al., 2022).
Methods:
This study leverages a national representative sample consisting of 18,174 children from 1,310 elementary schools where data were collected biannually from kindergarten to fifth grade. The analytical sample consisted of 2,916 students, 48.6% girls, 51.8% White, 13.2% Black, 24.7% Hispanic, 4.5% Asian, 1.8% Native American/Native Hawaiian, 4.1% Mixed, and 82.6% reported speaking English at home. Appropriate strata, PSU, and longitudinal weights were applied to incorporate school, teacher, and student information optimally.
Analytical approach:
Latent growth curve analysis was conducted to examine the science growth trajectories with the optimal mean functional form. Teachers’ instructional practices were incorporated as time-varying predictors to explain the science outcomes per grade above and beyond the underlying growth trajectory. Teachers’ self-efficacy was modeled as a mediator linking school leadership and latent growth factors, controlling for family SES, age, gender, race/ethnicity, home language background, school size, and school minority concentration.
Results (selected):
The nonlinear Gompertz model fit the data optimally, suggesting that an average child's science score had a lower asymptote of 14.551, grew a total of 76.265 points to the upper asymptote, with an average rate of approach to the upper asymptote of 0.338, and a timing parameter of 0.881 (i.e., when the rate of change is most rapid between fall Kindergarten and spring first grade). Teacher’s self-efficacy was found to fully mediate the effect of school leadership and students’ growth trajectories regarding initial status, total amount of change, growth rate and timing of change. Furthermore, teachers’ science instructional practices were also positively associated with students’ science achievement per grade.
Scientific/scholarly significance:
School leadership affects students’ science learning from early on and should be highlighted as we strive to improve STEM education (Valentine & Prater, 2011). The mediating role of teachers’ self-efficacy not only supports the four-path model but also speaks to the practical importance of improving school leadership on teachers’ efficacy.

Author

• Tingting Reid, Harvard University