Effective career guidance systems provide students with the opportunity to gain first hand experiences of what it is like to be in work. Through voluntary work in the community, schools can give students opportunity to undertake tasks under the supervision of a professional who is not a teacher in a workplace often in fields of strong career…

In this article, the change in examinee effort during an assessment, which we will refer to as persistence, is modeled as an effect of item position. A multilevel extension is proposed to analyze hierarchically structured data and decompose the individual differences in persistence. Data from the 2009 Program of International Student Achievement…

This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South…

Over the past century, technological development and better access to services has resulted in significant improvements to quality of life. Despite this, however, levels of stress, anxiety and depression are rising. Education can play a role in supporting well-being during and beyond schooling. Schools are increasingly concerned not only with…

This article focuses on analysing the effect of educational differentiation policies of OECD educational systems on socioeconomically disadvantaged students, based on data from PISA 2009. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a definition of two subgroups of disadvantaged students: those that achieve high scores, and those obtaining scores…

Using an equity perspective, this article compares the education systems of the United States and the Netherlands. Existing data examining student demographics, the organizational structures, curricula, funding, and student outcomes are examined. The Netherlands appears to be getting a "bigger bang for their buck." We make the case that…

This policy profile on education in the Netherlands is part of the new Education Policy Outlook series, which presents comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Building on the substantial comparative and sectorial policy knowledge base available…

This report has a simple aim: to present results from international assessments so readers can judge for themselves how American students stack up globally. It's intended to be a stand-alone supplement to the "Education Olympics" web event held between August 8th and August 22nd, 2008 (see edolympics.net). It shows how the U.S. has…

This research report builds on the results of the CATCH project (Webb and Dekker, 2002). The CATCH project is an effort to apply and scale up previous results and design a professional development program to bring about fundamental changes in teachers' instruction to support change in teachers' formative assessment practices. In this report we…