Background: In this cross-national study, Spanish, Finnish, and Swedish middle and high school students' procedural flexibility was examined, with the specific intent of determining whether and how students' equation-solving accuracy and flexibility varied by country, age, and/or academic track. The 791 student participants were asked to solve…

In this study we investigated word-problem (WP) item characteristics, individual differences in text comprehension and arithmetic skills, and their relations to mathematical WP-solving. The participants were 891 fourth-grade students from elementary schools in Finland. Analyses were conducted in two phases. In the first phase, WP characteristics…

Using the 2012 PIAAC data, our analysis confirms that there are significantly higher earnings and employment returns to "both" increasing levels of formally recognised education, and to increasing levels of numeracy, literacy and information and communication technologies (ICT) skills proficiencies controlling for the level of education.…

In this study, we investigated how empirical indicators of test-taking engagement can be defined, empirically validated, and used to describe group differences in the context of the Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC). The approach was to distinguish between disengaged and engaged response behavior by means of…

A common claim about mathematics education is that it should equip students to use mathematics in the "real world". In this paper, we examine how relationships between mathematics education and the real world are materialised in the curriculum across a sample of eleven jurisdictions. In particular, we address the orientation of the…

Bullying in school has become an international concern in recent decades. Yet, we know surprisingly little about inhibitors of teacher-targeted bullying. The study focused on exploring the interrelation between the teacher-working environment fit, bullying, experienced exhaustion and turnover intentions. Altogether 2310 comprehensive school…

The aim of this study was to create an instrument to measure elementary teachers' interest in teaching chemistry. The interest in chemistry teaching instrument (ICTI) was created to measure both the affective and cognitive components of interest. After establishing the face and content validity of the instrument, the internal consistency of the…

This longitudinal study aimed to investigate the extent to which primary school text comprehension predicts mathematical word problem-solving skills in secondary school among Finnish students. The participants were 224 fourth graders (9-10 years old at the baseline). The children's text-reading fluency, text comprehension and basic calculation…

Collaborative serious games have proven to have the potential to support joint knowledge construction, and there is a growing interest in applying such games to promote high-level learning. However, most of the existing studies have focused on the effects of functional, task-specific support while ignoring the social aspects of collaborative…

Complex multistep problem exercises are one way to enhance engineering students' learning of electromagnetics (EM). This study investigates whether exposure to complex problem exercises during an introductory EM course improves students' conceptual and procedural knowledge. The performance in complex problem exercises is compared to prior success…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…