Over the past three decades, the number of developing countries participating in International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSAs) has increased dramatically, while developing countries' usage of data from ILSAs for informing educational policy has not been fully realised. In this paper the authors argue that for ILSAs to be useful policy tools,…

Through a sociological analysis of the knowledge and actors that have become central to international assessments, the paper focuses on the processes that influence the production of shared narratives and agendas, adopting the position that their existence is not organic, but rather the product of undertakings that often fabricate and manage,…

There is an urgent need to improve elementary and secondary school classroom practices across India and the scale of this challenge is argued to demand new approaches to teacher professional learning. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) represent one such approach and one that, in the context of this study, is considered to provide a means by…

The aim of this study is to identify cohesion in the research project abstracts of Thai EFL engineering undergraduate students and to determine the writing patterns of their abstracts. Thirty-nine abstracts (200-300 words in length) from the faculty of Engineering in three different disciplines of the International Program were compiled and…

This is the first in a planned series of United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports tracking progress on the child-related indicators in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report highlights, through a data lens, the enormous task ahead for countries in meeting the 2030 Agenda for children. Through the development of projections to…

This is the executive summary of the first in a planned series of United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reports tracking progress on the child-related indicators in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The report highlights, through a data lens, the enormous task ahead for countries in meeting the 2030 Agenda for children. Through the…

This article presents discussion and recommendations on approaches to retrospectively evaluating development interventions in the long term through a systems lens. It is based on experiences from the implementation of an 18-month study to investigate the impact of development interventions on economic and social change over a 40-year period in the…

Expanding numbers of researchers are focusing on the scale and impact of private supplementary tutoring. Such tutoring is widely called shadow education, since much of its curriculum mimics that of regular schooling. Although shadow education has expanded significantly worldwide and is now recognized to have far-reaching significance, research…

Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, also known as PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies), were recently made available for 24 participating countries. PIAAC involves several developments in relation to the earlier international "adult skills" surveys (IALS in the 1990s and ALL in the 2000s), notably…

Today's college students must become adept both at interacting, cooperating, and engaging with individuals from diverse backgrounds and at grappling successfully with the kinds of unscripted problems and challenges that characterize life and work in the complex world they will enter upon graduation. Accordingly, global learning is widely…

Amid growing debates around international assessment tools in educational policy, few have critically examined how students themselves are cast in policy tool production processes and discourse. Drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of representation, we show how higher education (HE) "students" are constructed, fixed and normalized by the…

The growing cultural and linguistic diversities in Western countries and rapid globalization have put urgent demands on K-16 schools in terms of developing strategies to accommodate these changes. One of the critical issues for schools is to prepare pre-service and in-service teachers to work effectively with their diverse student populations. The…

In northern Botswana, conflict between subsistence farmers and elephants can result in destroyed agricultural crops and death for both species. In June of 2016, students and faculty mentors from four universities traveled to the Okavango Delta region of Botswana to participate in a community education project designed to develop locally relevant…

Many scales contain both positively and negatively worded items. Reverse recoding of negatively worded items might not be enough for them to function as positively worded items do. In this study, we commented on the drawbacks of existing approaches to wording effect in mixed-format scales and used bi-factor item response theory (IRT) models to…

The National Science Foundation contracted with Abt Associates to conduct an evaluation of its Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) program, which supports intellectually substantive collaborations between U.S. and foreign researchers in which the international partnership is essential to the research effort. The evaluation…