Organizational Supports for Instruction, Classroom Instruction, and Student Academic Self-Efficacy: Testing an Integrative Model through Multilevel Path Analysis

The current study contributes to the emergent line of inquiry that aims at transitioning the predominant paradigm in school reform research from its emphasis on exploring factors that affect students' learning in schools to a focus on the mechanisms of influence that may lead to those outcomes. Specifically, this study tests an integrative model that simultaneously examines the empirical associations between three organizational dimensions of schools -- Trust, Collaboration on Instruction, and Culture of Excellence -- two core dimensions of classroom instruction -- Academic Press and Control--, and students' Academic Self-Efficacy as the primary learning outcome. Unlike most studies to date, this study uses a multilevel analytic approach that examines these associations at the within-schools and between-schools levels, and uses students' perceptions of instructional quality as the primary measure of classroom instruction.;Findings from this investigation uncover the fact that substantive interpretations of the mechanisms of influence of organizational aspects of schools on teaching and learning cannot be dissociated from measurement and analytic considerations. First, contrasting results from two path analyses using student or teacher-reported measures of instruction suggest that the effect sizes reported in prior studies that use teachers as the sole reporters of organizational and instructional measures may be inflated due to potential shared method variance. Second, the multilevel methodological approach employed here allows for the extraction of school-level effects based on the shared variance of teachers within schools and for the identification of different configurations of associations between the variables of interest at each level. Overall, it is clear that Trust is a fundamental mechanism of influence for increasing schools' internal capacity to support other organizational processes more proximal to instruction. Culture of Excellence and its press for high performance might explain differences in the quality of instruction across schools. When comparing the levels of Academic Self-Efficacy in students across classrooms within schools, the Academic Support provided by teachers makes an important difference.;Future integrative studies could use a multiple measures of organizational and instructional constructs in order to avoid estimate distortions, and multielevel analytic approaches to further discern mechanisms of influence both within schools and between schools.