This case study investigates, at three Swedish schools, primary school students' knowledge of the equal sign. The schools were chosen as representatives of schools whose students have different socioeconomic backgrounds. The data consist of Grade 3 and 6 students' responses to an assessment form based on Matthews et al. ("JRME,"…

As we move further into the digital age, the acquisition of digital literacy (DL) and computational thinking (CT) skills is emerging internationally as an essential goal for students in contemporary school curricula. As the world becomes more uncertain and volatile due to impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), international unrest, climate…

Scholars of the global phenomenon of international student assessments (e.g., PISA, TIMSS) have paid little attention to the ways in which student users of these material objects are "configured" in nations that are located at the periphery of knowledge production. Our analysis takes the United Arab Emirates as its case study to capture…

In an attempt to broaden participation in STEM, a new type of high school is emerging, high schools which include a focus on engineering, have few or no academic admission criteria, and actively involve students of all levels of ability, known as Inclusive STEM High Schools (ISHSs). One aspect of successful ISHSs includes the intentional and…

This paper argues for a more complex literature around gender and math performance. In order to argue for this complexity, we present a small portion of data from a case study examining the performance of Kuwaiti students on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and on Kuwait national math tests. Westernized discourses suggest…

International surveys have served as agents of change for the introduction of reforms in curricula worldwide. The Israeli Ministry of Education set a goal of raising Israel's ranking in international surveys so that Israel will be among the 10 leading countries in the Program for International Student Assessment and Trends in International…

This simulation study was prompted by the current increased interest in linking national studies to international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) such as IEA's TIMSS, IEA's PIRLS, and OECD's PISA. Linkage in this scenario is achieved by including items from the international assessments in the national assessments on the premise that the average…

The problems of the decreasing enrolment of science students at secondary school level as well as the lagging science and mathematics achievement and literacy of Malaysian secondary students in international assessment studies point to a serious challenge for the government to improve Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)…

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…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study are two highly respected studies of school pupils' academic achievement. English policy-makers have been disappointed with school children's performance on these tests, particularly in comparison to the strong results of young people from East…

This paper analyzed elementary teacher education (hereafter 'TED') programs in the top performing European (TIMSS) countries to help inform future elementary TED policy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Methodological emphasis revolved around how much emphasis should be placed on general content knowledge (GCK), as opposed to general pedagogical…

Curriculum-assessment alignment is a well known foundation for good practice in educational assessment, for items' curricular validity purposes. Nowadays instruments are designed to measure pupils' competencies in one or more areas of competence. Sub-competence areas could be defined theoretically and statistical analysis of empirical data by…

International assessments, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), are being used to recommend educational policies to improve student achievement. This study shows that the cross-sectional estimates behind such recommendations may be biased. We use a unique data set from one country that applied the PISA mathematics test…

There is no doubt that a lesson plan is a necessary product of Lesson Study. However, the collaborative work among teachers that goes into creating that lesson plan is largely under-appreciated by non-Japanese adopters of Lesson Study, possibly because the effort involved is invisible to outsiders, with our attention going to its most visible…

One of the important differences between educational systems from different countries is the age at which students are placed into separate tracks. We examined the effects of the age at which tracking occurred on student achievement in a comparative perspective, making use of recent waves of three internationally standardized student assessments…