Classroom Disciplinary Climate of Schools and Gender

This lecture is part of the lecture serie Samtal við samfélagið held by the department of Sociology, Univeristy of Iceland.

David Reimer, Professor at Aarhus University, talks about how classroom disciplinary climate has emerged as a crucial factor with regard to student achievement. However, most previous studies have not explored potential gender differences in both students’ perceptions of the classroom disciplinary climate and the association between classroom disciplinary climate and student learning. Using data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment 2012 for the Nordic countries we find a significant association between the perceived classroom disciplinary climate of schools and students’ mathematics performance across countries. Based on an analysis of a pooled sample consisting of all five Nordic countries, we find that the correlation between classroom disciplinary climate of schools and maths achievement is significantly stronger for boys than girls. Further analyses show that this finding may partly be attributable to gender differences in the perception of the disciplinary climate of schools and that boys seem to perceive the classroom disciplinary climate of schools more positively than girls.