| Abstract: |
Abstract A safe school environment is a crucial aspect for sustainable educational quality as well as for promoting students’ academic performance. One of the factors damagingly affecting school environments is school bullying. Researchers investigating bullying problematic have revealed many negative consequences of bullying on students’ general well-being, including its adverse effect on school performance. The thesis aims to investigate the impact of school bullying on student’s academic achievement in the Czech Republic, using mathematics test score results of fourth grade students from TIMSS 2015. In the first stage, we use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression controlling for a number of student’s background variables. As the estimates obtained from this method might be biased due to endogeneity issues, we apply non-parametric technique propensity score matching (PSM) in the second stage. Our findings suggest that school bullying has a significant negative effect on students’ mathematics test scores. However, the effect loses its significance as the frequency of bullying decreases. The PSM technique yield similar estimates as the OLS. The results indicate that Czech educators and policymakers should take into account bullying as an important determinant of pupils performance and enhance anti-bullying prevention programs. Keywords bullying, bullying effects, academic performance, TIMSS 2015, ordinary least squares, propensity score matching, average treatment effects, the Czech Republic |
