Extending recent analyses using PISA data, the current study utilises the OECD's Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to test the central claims of knowledge capital theory. PIAAC has a distinct advantage over PISA in that it more directly tests levels of purported 'knowledge capital' across an entire national workforce, rather than offering…

This article examines how Chinese education officials interpret and utilise selective information from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to legitimate and consolidate contested reform messages and initiatives in Shanghai. A content analysis of data obtained from newspaper articles, official documents and education essays…

Creativity is the driving force of technological innovation and sustainable economic growth in the knowledge society. A central question, therefore, is how education helps to enhance creativity. As East Asian countries occupy the top of performance tests such as the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it is most important…

In contrast to traditional statistical approaches, which assume the existence of a latent common cause leading to the emergence and covariance of indicators, network modeling assumes that latent features emerge because of interactions between indicators. Clearly, such a way of treating the results of the Program for International Student…

Founded on several highly influential quantitative studies, the past decade has witnessed the OECD and World Bank increasingly converge on the view that cognitive levels of students and education quality, as proxied by international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), are the primary determinant of national economic growth worldwide. More recent OECD…

International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students' performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations' economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of…

This study investigates the multivariate relationships among socioeconomic factors, special education coverage (SEC), and reading across countries participating in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Three socioeconomic factors were considered: (a) gross national income per capita, (b) income inequality via the Gini index, and…

This article considers the growth of the international testing regime. It discusses sources of growth and empirically examines two related sets of issues: (1) the stability of countries' achievement scores, and (2) the influence of those national scores on subsequent economic development over different time lags. The article suggests that…

As it has been realized that education is a key to a long-term economic growth and to reducing social and economic disadvantages, educational inequality and its reflections in the geography have become some of the major issues in many countries. Turkey is in many ways a good example to analyze the relations between class, education, and regional…

Since at least the enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2002, standardized test scores have served as the primary measures of public school effectiveness. Yet, such scores fail to measure the ultimate goal of education: maximizing happiness. This exploratory analysis assesses nation level associations between test scores and happiness, controlling…

The authors examined the state of United States student academic readiness for higher education from a global perspective utilizing data from the Organization of Economic and Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests over a half a million 15 year old student's skills and knowledge.…

Globalization has unleashed profound changes in education. These include positivistic international school comparisons, a singular focus on schools as drivers of economic development, and the adoption of neoliberal market principles in school. These changes, however, generally go unexamined within the field and literature of global education.…

This article considers the counter-intuitive observation that some of the wealthiest nations can feature low tertiary graduation rates (e.g. Austria, Germany, and Switzerland). It also considers the observation that many countries with high tertiary graduation rates show low levels of social equity, while many countries with low tertiary…

Does the government control of school systems facilitate equality in school quality? Whether centralized or localized control produces more equality depends not only on what "could" happen in principle, but also on what does happen in practice. We use the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) database to examine the…

Stanford education professor Martin Carnoy examines four main critiques of how international test results are used in policymaking. Of particular interest are critiques of the policy analyses published by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Using average PISA scores as a comparative measure of student achievement is misleading…