Education reform efforts stemming from the Programme in International Student Achievement have strengthened in recent years, particularly in response to the growth of global references societies -- high achieving educational jurisdictions such as Finland, Hong Kong-China, and more recently Estonia and Singapore. Despite political rhetoric,…

In the face of ideologically driven inquiry and advocacy, debates about school choice and public-private-partnerships in education have produced more "light than heat." Although scholars have recently emphasized the need for a greater focus on the particulars of policy design, limitations of existing frameworks have inhibited rigorous…

Vocational Education and Training (VET), a key subset of formal education, bridges the gap between academic knowledge and the practical skills demanded by the job market. The PISA-VET initiative, led by the OECD, introduces a novel framework for assessing occupation-specific skills and employability competencies in five targeted vocational…

This extended literature review explores four broad themes concerning mathematics education, the first of which is on how U.S. school-aged children have been performing in mathematics at the national and international levels. Findings demonstrated that at the national level, their performance has been stagnant for many decades for high school…

In this study we use data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to investigate the effect of teachers' motivation on students' scientific literacy and motivation in Colombia. These relationships are explored using a multilevel modeling framework and through the lens of Self-Determination Theory. Although difficulties in…

Many studies investigating inquiry learning in science domains have appeared over the years. Throughout this period, inquiry learning has been regularly criticized by scholars who favor direct instruction over inquiry learning. In this vein, Zhang, Kirschner, Cobern, and Sweller (2022) recently asserted that direct instruction is overall superior…

Drawing on archival sources, interviews, and research literature, this article offers new insights into the making, structure and long-term effects of the International Educational Indicators (INES) programme of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The article argues that INES was crucial in setting the OECD on the…

Purpose: The three neighbouring nations of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore participated in the 2009, 2012 and 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) cycles. Despite many similarities between the three nations, Singapore has consistently been a top PISA performer, with Malaysia and Indonesia in the bottom third of the…

This paper traces the complexities, contingencies and tensions involved in the creation of a new, 'scientific' assessment in what we call Prefecture A in Japan. We start with a thick, granular description of the complicated and ongoing narrative of a new policy emergence. This descriptive account serves as a precursor to our application of an…