Abstract

Supportive school climates can add to student achievement and compensate for the negative contribution of low socioeconomic status (SES) to academic achievement. This study tested the added contribution of school and classroom climate aggregated to Chilean students’ mathematics test scores. We performed a secondary analysis of the censual cohort of 151,015 eighth-grade students (attending 8,412 classrooms in 5,619 schools) who completed the SIMCE test in Chile. We identified six dimensions of school climate, which we aggregated to the classroom and school level to fit three-level regression models. Students’ gender (girls) and low-SES were major negative predictors of test scores. School and classroom climate made an additional contribution to the explained variance in test scores. A positive school and classroom climate compensates for the negative contribution of low individual and school-level SES on students’ mathematics achievement justifies investing resources to promote positive school and classroom climates.