Spatial Methods in Educational Psychology: Analyzing Academic Proficiency from an Ecological Perspective

Laura Pires Gifford

From an ecological perspective, student learning is situated within a complex network of nested environmental systems. Every layer of context that influences students’ educational environments is grounded in a specific geographic place with its own social, economic, cultural, and environmental characteristics. The geographic diversity of these contexts contributes to differences in the opportunities, resources, and challenges that influence students’ educational outcomes. A spatial statistical framework can help in identifying how contextual variables and outcomes are distributed geographically, as well as how their relationships may vary by location. This study advances the application of spatial analysis within educational psychology by examining the geographic distribution of student proficiency rates in mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA), alongside contextual factors including youth risk and protective factors and community opportunity levels across Washington State. It also investigates how these contextual factors relate to proficiency rates and how these relationships vary across space. Spatial autocorrelation measures were used to examine geographic clustering across all study variables. Relationships between academic proficiency rates and predictors were modeled using standard linear regression models (LRMs) and multiscale geographically weighted regressions (MGWR), which capture how associations between variables vary across geographic locations and spatial scales. Results revealed the presence of spatial autocorrelation and heterogeneity in academic proficiency rates and contextual factors. MGWRs provided better model fit than LRMs. Several contextual variables that appeared non-significant in the LRMs were significant in the MGWRs, revealing spatial patterns and associations that would have been missed using global models alone. Mathematics proficiency showed greater spatial clustering and variation in the strength of associations with predictors compared to ELA. Notable regional differences between the western and eastern parts of the state were observed, demonstrating that spatial patterns of opportunity, risk and protective factors, and academic outcomes are not uniformly distributed across communities. The results were discussed within selected cases that illustrate some of the socially and historically meaningful contexts of the regions in which they occurred, drawing attention to the role of social and structural forces in shaping the everyday environments that influence students’ educational contexts and experiences.

Spatial Methods in Educational Psychology: Analyzing Academic Proficiency from an Ecological Perspective

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