Background

In the multilingual mathematics classroom, the assignment for teachers to scaffold students by instruction and guidance in order to facilitate language progress and learning for all, is often emphasised. In Sweden, where mathematics education is characterized by a low level of instructional responsibility for students’ learning gains, this is in part passed over to students’ own responsibility. By the use of a theoretical model of instructional responsibility (Hansson, 2010), and by means of two-level Structural Equation Modelling (M-SEM) analysis, using Swedish 8th grade data from TIMSS 2003, it was in this study investigated what effects different aspects of instructional responsibility have on students’ learning gains in the multilingual mathematics classroom, but also if there is pedagogical equity between different group-compositions. The theoretical framing of instructional responsibility is a Vygotskijan perspective on teachers’ engagement and students’ construction of knowledge, and also has Brousseau’s theory of didactic situations framed the concept.

When analysing causes for students’ learning gains much prior research is mostly focusing either individual underlying causes or general educational factors. When the instructional practise is investigated, mainly effects of specific components of the learning process are elucidated. A more holistic perspective on effects of instruction, which is taken in the present study, is particularly rare in previous research, and likewise is studies based on students’ language of home not frequent (Hattie, 2009). However, the importance of specific fundamental principles of content activities in the teaching is emphasized in some studies (Baumert et al., 2010; Hattie, 2009; Seidel & Shavelson, 2007). Because of the proxy variables used are correlational survey studies, however, expected to produce lower teaching effects than experimental designs (Seidel & Shavelson, 2007). An additional cause for the lower effects in standard survey research, which is not mentioned in Seidel’s and Shavelson’s study, could also be that many correlational survey studies are made on disaggregated level. This is shown not to take all influencing factors into consideration (Gustafsson, 2003), while it disregards the hierarchical, or multilevel, character of educational data. By instead taking full advantage of multilevel data through multilevel research approaches,which is done in this study, a potential for measuring high effects of teaching is obtained. As the multilevel approach is a significant aspect of educational survey research, it should be to taken into account when analysing instructional effects.

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