Michael Sciffer

Murdoch University · Education Research Group (ERG)

Secondary school differentiation in Australia is a substantial driver of the segregation of low SES and Indigenous students. Such segregation acts as a mechanism for the intergenerational transfer of social disadvantages. Indigenous students are doubly-segregated into schools with high concentrations of low SES and Indigenous students. No school ty...

Australia’s schooling system is far from achieving the Alice Spring’s (Mparntwe) Education Declaration’s equity goal. The Productivity Commission has identified the concentration of disadvantaged students into disadvantaged schools as a systemic barrier to system performance. Australian schools are among the most socially segregated in the OECD. Th...

This study examines the effect of school socioeconomic composition on student achievement growth in Australian schooling, and its relationship with academic composition utilising the National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) dataset. Previous research has found that school composition predicts a range of schooling outcomes. A criti...

Australia’s federated schooling system has dual national goals of excellence and equity for all students. Some of the highest performing international education systems achieve both goals. Socioeconomic educational inequality in Australia can be analysed into opportunities, contexts and outcomes. Disadvantaged students show lower outcomes in academ...

International research has consistently found that the socioeconomic segregation of schools may worsen inequalities in schooling outcomes through the socioeconomic compositional effect. This study examines whether the socioeconomic compositional effect varies between developed countries and potential mechanisms by which national schooling systems m...

We respond to Malatinszky and Armor’s, and Marks’ comments on our article recently published in this journal. We agree with Marks in the use of prior achievement to control for spurious effects in school effects research. Marks makes an incorrect statement about our article, refers to dated critiques, and presents an empirical demonstration with so...

School socio-economic compositional (SEC) effects have been influential in educational research predicting a range of outcomes and influencing public policy. However, some recent studies have challenged the veracity of SEC effects when applying residualised-change and fixed effects models and simulating potential measurement errors in hierarchical...

The veracity and strength of socio-economic school compositional effects have been questioned due to potential biases from measurement error and selection effects. We constructed a set of residualized-change and cross-sectional models to test and compare compositional effects for selection bias, differential sensitivity and substantiveness while ad...

School compositional effects have been examined for more than fifty years. While there is widespread agreement about their existence, some recent studies have rejected school socio-economic compositional effects based on criticisms of the methodologies of prior studies and their own findings. Given the potential importance of school composition eff...