Research on effective teaching has given a lot of information about what happens in classrooms where their students learn more than it could be expected by their context (eg Anderson, 2004; Borich, 2009; Brown, 2009; Creemers, 1994, Good, Wiley and Florez, 2009; Hunt, Wiseman, and Touzel, 2009, Kaplan and Owings, 2002; Killen, 2006; Murillo, 2005, 2007a, 2007b; Murillo, Martinez-Garrido & Hernandez-Castilla, 2011; Orlich, Harder, Callahan, Trevisan and Brown, 2010; Stronge, Tucker, and Hindman, 2004; Teddlie, Kirby, Stringfield, 1989; Walberg and Paik, 2000; Wenglinsky, 2002). Thus, we have a clear idea of what classroom factors are associated with student learning.
However, there is no much literature on what happens in classrooms where students get lower results than could be expected. What we have called "underperforming classrooms."
There is a strong tradition on studding schools that "failed" compared to other particularly effective (eg Bobbett, Ellett, Teddlie, Livier and Rugutt, 2002; Shefali 2011), or describing their characteristics (Stoll, 2005; van de Grift and Houtveen, 2006, 2007). However, studies focused on what happens in the classrooms where children learn less than it would be expected, there are much less frequent. In Latin America, the lack of such studies is even more evident (Murillo, 2007a).
The objective of this research is to understand which elements of the classroom determine that the Primary students do not learn as much as would be expected given their educational and sociocultural context.
Perhaps for studying this type of classroom – the key element is its sampling of such classrooms. How do we know they really are "failed"?
This paper comes from a previous study in which a study of 90 classrooms in eight countries in Latin America were characterized by their low outcomes in national assessments or in the supervisor opinion (Murillo, 2007b). Data from different performance variables, cognitive (Performance in mathematics and Language) and socio-affective (Self-concept, Coexistence, Social development and Satisfaction with the school) were obtained and worked from an Added Value approach (controlling previous performance, Socio-economic level and cultural family level, Mother tongue and Cultural group). With these variables data the eight classrooms, one for each country, with a worse than expected performance for its context were selected.