Multidimensional school success in light of structural and process components of students’ family and classroom environment

Abstract

It is important to understand school success as a multidimensional construct that comprises multiple goals, including the acquisition of cognitive competences (e.g., reading competence), the emergence of positive noncognitive outcomes (e.g., motivation), and the achievement of institutionalized indicators of success (e.g., good grades), in order to adequately assess whether all students can succeed in school according to their own abilities. However, these outcomes are influenced not only by characteristics of the students themselves, but also of their environment, with the family and the classroom representing two of the most proximal and relevant environments for students’ development and school success. Both the family and classroom environment comprise relatively stable structure (or context) variables (e.g., the socioeconomic background of the family or composition of the classroom) as well as more malleable process variables (e.g., parental involvement or instructional focus). Accordingly, this cumulative dissertation includes four studies that focused on two overarching research questions, investigating (1) how structure variables of the family and classroom were associated with different dimensions of school success and (2) to what extent family and classroom process variables were related school success and acted as mediators and moderators of the associations addressed in the first research question. The studies are embedded into a theoretical framework built on the extant literature which employs a multidimensional understanding of school success and emphasizes the importance of structure and process variables of both the family and classroom environment. Findings highlight, for example, the importance of parental involvement and educational beliefs for students’ positive noncognitive outcomes during emergency remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic (Study I); the distinct role of multilingual learners’ heritage language’s lexical distance to the target language German for their reading acquisition (Study II); unique links of families’ educational aspirations and socioeconomic status to students’ life satisfaction for first- and second-generation immigrant-origin learners, respectively (Study III); and differential association of various sociodemographic variables on the family and classroom level with cognitive and noncognitive reading-related outcomes, but no mediating or moderating role of instructional focus (Study IV). An overarching discussion contextualizes the contributions of the dissertation in light of the extant theoretical and empirical literature and discusses implications for theory and practice that can be drawn from the results.