While the family is a critical determinant of educational achievement, methodological difficulties and the availability of data limit estimation of the family contribution in school effectiveness models. This study uses multilevel modeling to estimate the proportion of variation in student educational achievement between families, family-level…

Applications of multilevel models to continuous outcomes nearly always assume constant residual variance and constant random effects variances and covariances. However, modeling heterogeneity of variance can prove a useful indicator of model misspecification, and in some educational and behavioral studies, it may even be of direct substantive…