  Over the past decades, researchers have explored the relationship among home
resources, school environment, and students' mathematics achievement in a large
amount of studies. Many of them suggested that rich home resources for learning
were related to higher average academic achievement. Some also suggested that
the home background was closely associated with the learning environment, and
therefore, influenced students' achievements. Thus, this study hypothesized
that students who own more home resources would perform better than students
who possess fewer resources and that schools that have more socioeconomically
advantaged students, located in high-income neighborhoods, and possess more
instructional resources would have better mathematics performance. The study
focuses on eighth graders in Taiwan and explores the variance in mathematics
achievement of students as a function of student and school level differences.
