School Age, Student Achievement and Structural Breaks

The school building is a built environment in the physical learning environment. How it is perceived by students, teachers, leaders, parents, community and interacts with content, resources and societal progress have important implications on student outcomes. The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) public education system experienced system wide governance changes, first in early years of 1970s and the second one in December 1988 with the award of self-government for ACT. In addition, 1970s also experienced a shift in construction material as concrete was integrated into construction of ACT public buildings. The building codes also experienced movement towards uniform enactment first in early 1970s and then in early 1990s. All these structural breaks had influenced the ACT public school buildings as governance changes resulted in construction of new school buildings with integration of concrete in the construction material and enactment of uniform building codes having implications on school building architecture. This paper employs the value-added multilevel modeling approach after incorporating the structural breaks to estimate the impact of school age on student achievement by dividing the ACT public schools into three groups (1914-1970, 1971-1990 and 1991-2019) based on their date of opening . The ACT public schools individual level data of student standardized test scores namely National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) scores in four domains of numeracy, reading, spelling, and writing have been used in the empirical modeling for the period 2015-19. The paper demonstrates that built environment has a profound impact on student achievement and post 1970 ACT public school buildings positively impact student achievement compared to ACT public schools constructed during 1914-1970. Though, the mean score analysis could lead to misleading conclusions as mean scores for schools constructed during the period 1914-1970 are higher than the other two relatively new ACT public school building groups (1971-1990 & 1991-2019) in all domains and for all year levels. However, after adjusting for prior score, student and school level contextual factors, the student achievement scores in reading, spelling, and writing domains are significantly higher in relatively new ACT public school building groups compared to the old school building group (1914-1970)