School Discipline and Scholastic Achievement in Israel

The current paper briefly summarizes a larger study on school discipline in Israel, its determinants, and its relation to pupil achievement based on TIMSS 2003 data. The fuller study is part of a nine-country international study on the relation between school discipline and pupil achievement. Its findings show Israeli pupils to be less disciplined than their international counterparts.

Moreover, Israeli pupils have been found to be lower achievers despite higher levels of parental education than in the other participating countries. Can poor discipline explain the relatively low achievements? The study’s conclusion is that if discipline among Israeli pupils matched the international average, the achievement gap between Israel and the other participating countries would diminish considerably but not completely vanish.

This appears as a chapter in the Center’s annual publication State of the Nation Report – Society, Education and Policy 2010.