Incorporating student mobility in studying academic growth in math: comparing several alternative multilevel formulations

ABSTRACT Increasing pupil mobility has led to widespread concern among parents, educators, and policymakers regarding its negative effects on academic performance. An important issue in examining mobility effects in longitudinal school achievement comparisons is providing accurate estimates. The presence of pupil mobility suggests that we should model pupils as belonging to the series of schools attended and not just their first or final school. We discuss several challenges in accounting for student mobility and, because of the presence of mobile pupils, how to represent the contribution of multiple schools attended on estimating academic growth properly. We then contrast several previous longitudinal multilevel models utilized with two cross-classified multiple membership (CCMM) models, which have been proposed to cumulate annual school effects on pupils’ academic growth better given the complexity of the multilevel data structure. We discuss our results in terms of their theoretical and practical implications for research on school academic improvement.