Analysing Differential School Effectiveness Through Multilevel and Agent-Based Modelling

Multilevel Models (MLM) have pioneered the analysis of hierarchical data of two or more levels. Agent-Based Models (ABM) are also used to analyse social phenomena in which there are two or more levels involved. This paper addresses a comparison between MLM and ABM. To provide a basis of comparison, we focus on differential school effectiveness analysis, where MLM has been well studied, using data from the London Educational Authority’s Junior Project. A MLM is fitted and an ABM of pupils’ educational attainment using a social network structure is built. The paper reports the results of both models and compares their performances in terms of predictive and explanatory power. Although the fitted MLM outperforms the proposed ABM, the latter still offers a reasonable fit and provides a causal mechanism to explain differences in school performance that is absent in the MLM.