This paper examines and builds on an earlier contribution to this journal focusing on private supplementary tutoring -- widely known as shadow education -- in Francophone West and Central Africa. Drawing on wider literature about research methods in this domain, it examines the basis for the numerical estimates presented in the original article…

State education agencies are sitting on rich repositories of quantitative and qualitative assessment data. This document is designed to provide a conceptual framework and implementation guidance that can help agency leadership leverage and interrogate student performance data in systematic ways for reporting, outreach, and planning purposes. The…

Assessing achievement is a complex task due to its dependence on multiple factors and the hierarchical structure of educational data, yet surveys like TIMSS offer valuable insights into its determining factors like students' mathematics anxiety. However, disregarding the nested structure of data and ignoring the assumptions of models causes poor…

Digital technologies have the potential to revolutionize education by enhancing quality, fairness, and efficiency. However, equitable access to these technologies remains a challenge. ILSAs (international large-scale assessments) have shown that the relationship between digital use and performance varies across countries and over time. To fully…

Multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) models have generated increasing interest in the psychometrics literature. Efficient approaches for estimating MIRT models with dichotomous responses have been developed, but constructing an equally efficient and robust algorithm for polytomous models has received limited attention. To address this gap,…