Achievement motivation is a well-documented predictor of a variety of positive student outcomes. However, given observed group differences in motivation and related outcomes, motivation instruments should be checked for comparable item and scale functioning. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate measurement scale comparability and…

Introduction: The prevalence rates of bullying vary significantly across countries and continents. Specifically, UNESCO estimates that the prevalence rates vary from 22.8% (CentralAmerica) to 48.2% (Sub-Saharan Africa). Recently these differences among countries andregions have been attributed to culture- and country-level variables. Thus, the…

Purpose: This study aimed to compare the performance of latent class differential item functioning (DIF) approach and IRT based DIF methods using manifest grouping. With this study, it was thought to draw attention to carry out latent class DIF studies in Turkey. The purpose of this study was to examine DIF in PISA 2015 science data set. Research…

This article examines French and English average performances and educational inequality in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) between 2000 and 2018. It asks why English average scores in 2018 are much higher than those of France when they were fairly similar in previous PISA assessments. It questions why the impact of…

Some education systems have both quality and equality. They have achieved educational equity. This study aimed to uncover the practical wisdom of such systems in developing educational equality. A quantitative research design was used. Family capital and science achievement were the variables analyzed. They were secondary data collected by the…

When there are no personal consequences associated with test performance for examinees, rapid guessing (RG) is a concern and can differ between subgroups. To date, the impact of differential RG on item-level measurement invariance has received minimal attention. To that end, a simulation study was conducted to examine the robustness of the…

This paper derives efficiency scores for around 8,500 schools in 30 countries, using Programme for International Student Assessment 2012 data and a nonparametric approach called data envelopment analysis as method. On average, achievement scores of schools can be increased by 27%, holding inputs constant. Efficiency scores vary considerably both…

Testlets have advantages such as making it possible to measure higher-order thinking skills and saving time, which are accepted in the literature. For this reason, they have often been preferred in many implementations from in-class assessments to large-scale assessments. Because of increased usage of testlets, the following questions are…

Turkey's politically induced 'curricular modernization initiative' intended a philosophical change and a system-level transformation from behaviouristic to constructivist-inspired pedagogies in the early 2000s. Science curriculum has been one of the curricula that has taken precedence. It has changed four times since then. The latest science…

Most studies suggest that students develop computational thinking (CT) through learning programming. However, when the target of CT is decoupled from programming, emerging evidence challenges the assertion of CT transferability from programming. In this study, CT was operationalized in everyday problem-solving contexts in a learning experiment (n…

There is strong controversy over the application and effects of the Linguistic Immersion Policy in Catalonia, a policy that established that the Catalan language should constitute the only vehicular language during the different levels of compulsory schooling. While some of the effects of this policy have been determined, the evidence on other…

Valid cross-country comparisons of student learning and pivotal factors contributing to it, such as teaching quality, offer the possibility to learn from outstandingly effective educational systems across the world and to improve learning in classrooms by providing policy relevant information. Yet, it often remains unclear whether the instruments…

This paper uses representative student data from St. Petersburg, Russia to analyze school segregation by parental socioeconomic status and student academic performance. The proposed systematic segregation indices account for ordinal variables and take expected segregation into account. We decompose segregation by school type, school, and classes…

Learning behavior of East Asian students has been debated due to their striking performance on international large-scale assessments. This study was a comparative study using latent class analysis to examine students' perceptions of learning strategies, students' reported learning strategy use, and the relationships between learning strategies and…

Standard errors computed according to the operational practices of international large-scale assessment studies such as the Programme for International Student Assessment's (PISA) or the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) may be biased when cross-national differential item functioning (DIF) and item parameter drift are…