ABSTRACT
164Understanding what factors influence students’ achievement is crucial to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of higher educational systems. From a statistical perspective, it is challenging to model the correlation between the outcome variable (e.g., enrollment, retention, high school grades) and several students, teacher, learning, and educational characteristics (e.g., personal and educational background of students, course size and its composition, teacher, and curriculum). In addition, in large datasets it is unclear what variables should be included in the analysis. Several studies have sought to identify the factors that impact students’ performance using different model specifications. Nevertheless, the question of which specification should be used has not been thoroughly addressed in the literature (Tobias and Li, 2004).
