OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN maths: A curriculum approach with timss 2011 data
Christian Bokhove
University of Southampton

Previous studies have shown that socioeconomic status (SES) and ‘opportunity to learn’ (OTL), which can be typified as ‘curriculum content covered’, are significant predictors of students’ mathematics achievement. Seeing OTL as curriculum variable, this paper explores multilevel models (students in classrooms in countries) and appropriate classroom (teacher) level variables to examine SES and OTL in relation to mathematics achievement in the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2011), with OTL operationalised in several distinct ways.  Results suggest that the combination of SES and OTL explains a considerable amount of variance at the classroom and country level, but that this is not caused by country level OTL after accounting for SES.