The OECD's PISA program assesses 15-year-old students globally in key competencies every 3 years, providing influential data on education quality and spurring policy debates. In the latest cycle, the innovation domain focused on creative thinking, assessing over 140,000 students across 60+ countries, in the largest study of adolescent creativity…

In 2018 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched its International Early Learning Child Well-being Study (IELS), also known as Baby PISA. In the first round of data collection, the IELS focused on three OECD countries: England, Estonia and the United States. In this article we show that a similar study of…

Creativity has fascinated scholars for generations, and its identification as one of the key 'twenty-first century skills' necessary for economic growth has led to renewed interest. This creates two challenges for the OECD: its flagship Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) does not directly measure creativity. Secondly, the…

Purpose: The article offers a progressive reading of ESD with a teaching example to decolonise SSE despite constraints set by the school system. Design/methodology/approach: The article presents ESD's idea of thought within 'the big picture' of global education. After that, a description of an expert group is given, tasked with developing a…

As the OECD and UNESCO increasingly work in the same geographical and thematic areas, this paper explores the interplay between the organizations in relation to the making of global learning metrics and the global monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goal 4. Although the organizations seek to cooperate, this paper shows how this is limited by…

Children from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds tend to have more negative self-perceptions. More negative self-perceptions are often related to lower academic achievement. Linking these findings, we asked: Do children's self-perceptions help explain socioeconomic disparities in academic achievement around the world? We addressed this…

During the last decade, Finnish teacher education (TE) has received special interest due to the Finnish students' success in PISA. Although TE in Finland has many strengths, there are also challenges that need to be addressed. One of the main challenges is the relation between theory and practice. As action research (AR) has been suggested as one…

We aimed to examine the effect of ICT use, parental support and student hindering on science achievement in Turkey, USA and South Korea with using PISA 2018 data. PISA is one of the biggest international assessment study aiming comparison of students' academic capabilities in science, mathematics and reading among participant countries. For this…

Typically, more primary students qualify for mathematics intervention support than schools have the capacity to assist. This highlights the importance of every primary mathematics teacher having the expertise to design inclusive and responsive curricula and instruction for students who may experience difficulty. Our study addresses this issue…

Recent years have brought a major shift in the field of international comparative education with the rise of quantitative assessments of student achievement. Within these studies, outside-school-time (OST) as a supplement and complement to schooling has been included. However, OST is difficult to define and measure; and challenges multiply when…

This article investigates the failure of introducing comprehensive schooling in Austria, one of few 'conservative' outliers in the European post-war reform trend where early selection survived reform attempts in the 1970s. In particular, the focus is on the most recent attempt to postpone tracking from the age of 10-14 in the wake of Austria's…

Politicians are pushing school boards to do more to ensure students leave school with the financial literacy skills they will need to navigate an increasingly complex financial marketplace. Financial literacy education must start early to achieve this goal, yet there has been very little Canadian research on financial literacy education at the…

Differences in achievement between disadvantaged pupils and their more advantaged peers are a focus for policy in all parts of the UK. A gap in educational outcomes between pupils from less-affluent backgrounds compared to their peers is evident by the time they start school and only widens as they move through the school years. In 2018, nearly 80…

Founded on several highly influential quantitative studies, the past decade has witnessed the OECD and World Bank increasingly converge on the view that cognitive levels of students and education quality, as proxied by international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), are the primary determinant of national economic growth worldwide. More recent OECD…

Background/Context: Scholars have attributed the underperformance of U.S. students relative to students in other high-income countries to unequal access to high-quality educational environments. Poor students are presumed to do disproportionately worse on international achievement tests and, consequently, to pull down the U.S. average. Conversely,…