Disciplinary climate within and between schools and science achievement. Evidence from PISA 2025 in Colombia
Using PISA 2025 data from Colombia, this study finds that while a school's average disciplinary climate is strongly and positively associated with science achievement, individual students' relative perceptions of climate within their schools show no significant link to performance.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
In the world of education, researchers have long understood that a student's success is not just about the books they carry or the intelligence they bring to the classroom. It is also deeply shaped by the environment in which they learn. One of the most critical elements of this environment is the disciplinary climate. This is not about harsh punishments or strict rules in a punitive sense. Instead, it refers to the basic order of a classroom: whether lessons start on time, whether students can hear the teacher, whether they can work without constant interruption, and whether the room is filled with productive focus rather than noise and chaos. When a classroom has a good disciplinary climate, it creates the necessary conditions for learning to happen. For decades, studies have shown that schools with better order tend to have students who achieve higher scores on tests. However, a lingering question has remained about exactly what that connection means. Does a well-behaved classroom help a specific student because that student feels more at ease, or does the overall atmosphere of the school help everyone simply because the school itself is a more orderly place?
A new study from Colombia, using data from the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment, sets out to untangle this distinction. The researchers looked at nearly 6,500 fifteen-year-old students across 259 schools to see how the feeling of order in science lessons related to their test scores. They wanted to know if the benefit came from a student's personal experience of the classroom compared to their peers, or from the shared reality of the school as a whole. To do this, they had to separate two different things that often get mixed together: the individual student's socioeconomic background and the average wealth or poverty of the school they attend. By carefully separating these factors, the team could see clearly where the influence of order actually lived.
The results revealed a striking difference between the individual experience and the collective reality. When the researchers looked at how a student felt about the order in their own class relative to other students in the same school, the connection to science test scores was very weak and statistically indistinguishable from zero. In other words, if a student felt their class was slightly more orderly than their classmates thought, it did not predict that they would score higher on the test. However, the picture changed completely when they looked at the school as a whole. Schools where the average student reported a high level of order and discipline saw significantly higher science scores. Specifically, a school with a one-unit increase in its average disciplinary climate score was associated with an increase of nearly 15 points in science achievement. This gap was substantial, representing a clear and measurable advantage for students in more orderly schools.
This finding held true even after the researchers accounted for the socioeconomic makeup of the schools. In many systems, wealthier schools tend to be more orderly, which makes it hard to tell if the order itself is helping or if it is just a side effect of having more resources. In this study, the benefit of a good disciplinary climate remained strong even when the researchers separated the school's overall wealth from the individual wealth of each student. The order of the school mattered on its own. Furthermore, the study checked whether this relationship was specific to science or if it applied to reading and math as well. The pattern was consistent across all subjects, suggesting that a well-ordered school environment supports learning in general, not just in one specific subject.
The researchers also explored whether a good disciplinary climate could act as a buffer, helping students from poorer backgrounds catch up to their wealthier peers within the same school. They found no clear evidence for this. While orderly schools had higher average scores overall, the gap between rich and poor students within those schools did not appear to shrink or grow based on the level of order. This suggests that while a good climate raises the average performance of a school, it does not necessarily change the internal dynamics of inequality between students. The study also ruled out the idea that the connection was simply a statistical trick caused by how the data was grouped or by missing information. The results remained stable when the researchers tested different ways of measuring the climate, removed specific schools from the analysis, or focused only on public schools.
It is important to note that this study shows a strong link, not a cause-and-effect relationship. Because the data was collected at a single point in time, it is possible that schools with higher scores simply feel more orderly to their students, rather than the order causing the high scores. The researchers acknowledge that other factors, such as school leadership or teacher stability, could be driving both the order and the achievement. However, the study provides a very clear map of where the association lies. It shows that in the Colombian education system, the shared experience of order in a school is a powerful predictor of success, far more so than any single student's personal perception of how orderly their specific class feels compared to their friends. The takeaway is not that a single student's feeling of order doesn't matter, but rather that the collective atmosphere of the school is the dominant force shaping academic outcomes.
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