Exploring the social ecological model based on national student achievements: extracting educational leaders’ role

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the effect of internal school factors such as school violence and class size, and external school factors such as family socio-economic resources on student math achievements, based on the social ecological model, eliciting an integrative approach. Data were collected from an Israeli national database, using average percentage scores for each school. The scores were based on results from 20,979 students in 191 junior high schools participating in the study. The study findings showed that in addition to low violence at school, family socio-economic status, including private math tutoring and computer-based math learning at home, predicted high math achievements. School violence partially mediated the relationship between sector and student achievements in math, while family socio-economic status partially mediated the relationship between district and student achievements in math. Our integrative model results may help school leaders to design policy to increase school effectiveness and reduce gaps among districts and sectors. The findings may encourage school leaders to strengthen the relations between schools and students’ homes in order to influence students’ activities there, especially in areas with low socio-economic status, to conduct school activities to reduce school violence, and increase computer-based learning in students’ homes.