University-School Partnership: a Lens for School Type Differences in Fractional Knowledge

Abstract

This study will examine school type differences in fifth-grade students’ fractional knowledge using data from a university-school partnership. The participants will be a total of 203 students from a public school and a private school in two districts willing to collaborate in the University within School Project. International large-scale assessments generally show that private school students outperform public school students in mathematics, science, and reading (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2009). While there is a strong theoretical impetus in the superiority of private schools, in more recent studies, after controlling for student and home background factors there appears to be little to no statistically significant school type differences in standardized test scores (OECD, 2013). In a related vein, Turkey had the largest variance internationally between schools in student performance: The overall achievement gap between the lower and higher achievers was large (OECD, 2007), and that this discrepancy was attributable to the between-school variation while controlling for family background and demographic characteristics (Alacacı & Erbaş, 2010).