**Table 3. Marginal Impact of Social Factors and Disciplinary Climate on Mathematics Performance (PISA)**

||2000|2009|2012|2015|MENA|Non-<br>MENA|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Social factors (individual)|21.6|21.6|20.5|30.0|17.1|21.6|
|Social factors (school)|63|59.5|57|57.5|55,2|57.9|
|Disciplinary climate (ind.)|4.1|5|8.9|6.4|6,4|6.3|
|Disciplinary climate (school)|21.6|23.2|24.8|18.5|39,4|23.1|
|N. Obs.|93,390|420,565|256,143|345,576|47,856|722,242|
|R<sup>2</sup>|0.43|0.48|0.45|0.51|0,36|0.45|

Source: Analysis using PISA 2000-2015. Country-fixed effects are included. Reading: Pooling data for the MENA countries participating in PISA from 2000 to 2015, an increase in one standard deviation in the disciplinary climate index at the school level is associated, all other things equal, with an increase in math performance amounting to 39.4 points.

School disciplinary climate has been proven to be a major determinant of math performance in countries outside the MENA region as well. For instance, school disciplinary climate had a positive and significant impact in distinct cultural settings using PISA 2003 data in the Republic of Korea, Japan and the United States (Shin and others 2009). Evidence showed that the educational context and pedagogies in these three countries do effectively differ, as competitive-learning preference and mathematics interest were stronger predictors of performance in Korea and Japan while instrumental motivation had more explanatory power in the United States . Using TIMSS data pooled from the participating countries from the same year showed that disciplinary climate, classroom disruptions but also school violence reported by students all have a significant negative impact on math performance.

The benefits of improving disciplinary climate in a MENA school are on average about 50 percent higher than in other regions in terms of students’ performance. Although the PISA sample usually contains a limited number of MENA countries, the positive effect of disciplinary climate on mathematics performance here is stronger than in schools outside the MENA region.<sup>9</sup> Similar results have been found when applying a similar methodology on the TIMSS data<sup>10</sup> (see Table 4). Improvement in the school safety indicator by 3 standard deviations roughly increases math performance by about 25 points. One explanation of the greater importance of disciplinary climate in MENA could be the far more deteriorated climate, which tends to act as a main bottleneck for learning in the region.

The positive association between classroom disciplinary climate and students’ performance stems from the fact that fewer disruptions in the classroom increases the effective learning time and time-on-task. While classroom observations were not conducted for this analysis, it is presumed that a major hindrance to student performance in classrooms with high prevalence of disruption is the loss of instructional time, likely as a result of time spent on discipline management. It is unclear how much time is lost in MENA classrooms that have a high occurrence of classroom disruption. However, international evidence shows

> 9 Jordan, Tunisia Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Lebanon.

> 10 Using TIMSS data, it is possible to relate school safety and students’ mathematics performance. Considering gender, age, the use of the language of instruction at home, as well as educational possessions, it is possible to compute a socioeconomic index tailored to the survey. That index is averaged at the school level to take into account peer effects. As students’ performance highly depends on their peers’ ability, students tend to benefit from being enrolled in a class with affluent peers. A linear model explaining students’ mathematics performance is estimated for MENA and non-MENA countries. The disciplinary climate is indeed measured at the individual level while the school safety index is measured at the school level. As the aggregation reduces the variance of the indicator, the variance of the disciplinary climate is indeed about 3 times as large as the variance of the school safety indicator. As one TIMSS point is grossly comparable to one PISA point, it appears that improving the school climate by 3 standard deviations – which corresponds to an increase of the disciplinary climate of one standard deviation – roughly increases math performance by about 25 points.

9