The major concern of this study is to examine the validity of the Creemers' theoretical model of
school effect and the possibility of its application in Korea by using the first wave data from
KELS(Korea Education Longitudinal Study) as carried out by the Korean Educational Development
Institute. Also, the result of this study was compared with results of related studies which have been
done in other countries in order to finds points of similarities and differences among the countries.
According to the result, among the student-level variables, the attitude-related variables, especially
motivation to study mathematics and self-confidence, had an enormous effect on the mathematics
achievement level. And class attitude (concentration) and student integrity (frequency of absence)
variables also had a significant effect. But on the teacher and school level, the effective variables
were limited to grouping, mean SES, mean mathematics achievement, and urbanization variables,
which shows that the influence of teacher and school-level variables are relatively small compared to
student-level variables.
These results suggest that while the Creemers' model has a partial explanatory power on the
middle school effect of Korea, it is limited in its ability to set the student and school-level variables.
In particular, there were many student-level variables that were not accounted for, so there is a need
to search for additional meaningful variables. For the study of our nation's school effect, we must
change the former model and consider the particular tradition and climate of Korea education system.