This study investigated effective teaching factors and student reading strategies as predictors of student reading achievement in the United States and China. Participants were 10,348 students in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, 5115 from China and 5233 from the United States. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA)…

In this interview with David Hursh, Bob Lingard comments on his current and/or recently completed research projects in respect to new modes of global governance in schooling and the complementarity between international large scale assessments and national testing. He also looks at a project that, in conjunction with school leaders, teachers,…

Prior research has suggested that staff-centred organisational factors such as participation, morale and shortage can have a significant effect on organisational outcomes. However, relatively little attention has been paid to cross-country examination of these relationships specifically for educational organisations such as schools, colleges, and…

Several recent, highly influential comparative studies have made strong statistical claims that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA will lead to higher GDP growth rates. These claims have provided the primary source of legitimation for policy reforms championed by leading international organisations, most notably the World…

According to Bronfenbrenner's socio-ecological model, school is an essential microsystem of the developing child. Schools provide important developmental contexts for children and adolescents, as they constitute environments that might either foster or evoke students' emotional instability. In particular, less is known about the precise and…

This paper explores the relationship among ICT infrastructure (i.e., computing devices and Internet), one-to-one computing program and student ICT activities in school. It also looks into the differences of how ICT is being used in the teaching of English, mathematics and science at the elementary school level in relation to the availability of…

Subject-specific self-efficacy is a measure of confidence in one's own ability to complete tasks related to that subject. This confidence does not necessarily reflect actual ability in the subject and can be an over- or underestimate of true ability. We use nationally representative samples of 15-year-old students from the US to measure the degree…

Using PISA 2009 data for Croatia, this paper addresses the relationship between socio-economic background, cultural capital and educational attainment. Following Bourdieu, we emphasized the importance of interpreting cultural capital effects as effects of family habitus. The results indicated that the material and the relational dimension of…

Development of pupils' deep learning approach is an important goal of education nowadays, considering that a deep learning approach is mediating conceptual understanding and transfer. Different performance at PISA tests of Romanian and Hungarian pupils cause us to commence a study for the analysis of learning approaches employed by these pupils.…

This study investigated the effect of time spent on homework and mathematics anxiety on mathematics achievement. Data from a nationally representative US sample consisting of 4,978 cases was used to predict mathematics achievement from time spent on homework and mathematics anxiety while controlling for demographic differences such as gender,…

One of the major imperatives behind the comprehensivisation of secondary education was the belief that postponing the age at which students are tracked in different educational routes would mitigate the effect of social background on educational outcomes. Comparative investigations of large-scale international student achievement tests in…

This paper studies the relationship between ethnic school composition and classroom disruption in secondary education in the context of migration policies. We measured classroom disruption using students' reports from 3533 schools in 20 countries provided by cross-national PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2009 data. We employ…

Using PISA data for 16 Western OECD countries having comprehensive school systems, we explore the conditions under which the socioeconomic composition of schools affects educational efficiency and equality, to a greater or lesser extent. First, a multilevel analysis is applied to examine and compare the effect of school socioeconomic composition…

Differential item functioning (DIF) can undermine the validity of cross-lingual comparisons. While a lot of efficient statistics for detecting DIF are available, few general findings have been found to explain DIF results. The objective of the article was to study DIF sources by using a mixed method design. The design involves a quantitative phase…

This study intends to compare and contrast student and school factors that are associated with students' mathematics self-efficacy in the United States and China. Using hierarchical linear regressions to analyze the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 data, this study compares math self-efficacy, achievement, and variables…