The aim of the OECD Career Readiness project is to identify patterns of teenage attitudes and activities that are associated with better transitions into employment by analysing multiple national longitudinal datasets. This paper looks for further evidence of the link between teenage activities, experiences and career-related thinking and adult…

Australia has declared its ambition to be within the "top five" in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by 2025. So serious is it about this ambition, that the Australian Government has incorporated it into the "Australian Education Act, 2013". Given this focus on PISA results and rankings, we go beyond…

Background: This paper analyses the role of, and approach to, policy referencing and borrowing in Hong Kong's recent reforms that culminated in the creation of its New Academic Structure and the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education. Main argument: It argues that Hong Kong has gone further than most jurisdictions not just in responding to…

Geography lessons center on a language-based product with socially relevant geographic content. The subject of geography in secondary schools in Germany faces three major challenges that make a stronger focus on language in the monolingual geography classroom necessary. First, more than 30 percent of German pupils in secondary schools have a…

This paper examines the expansion of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and associated growth in the influence of the OECD's education work. PISA has become one of the OECD's most successful "products" and has both strengthened the role of the Directorate for Education within the organization and enhanced…

This paper examines the outstanding performance of Shanghai, China on PISA 2009 and its effects on other national systems and within the global education policy field. The OECD's PISA is helping to create this field by constituting the globe as a commensurate space of school system performance. The effects of Shanghai's success are considered in…

Teacher education has been undergoing significant transformations worldwide in recent decades, and China has made continuous efforts in its quest for world-class teachers. This paper aims at a comprehensive investigation of the complex policy process in China's national initiatives to nurture a world-class teaching force, with qualitative findings…

Assessment of learning plays a dominant role in formal education in the forms of determining features of curriculum that are emphasized, pedagogic methods that teachers use with their students, and parents' and employers' understanding of how well students have performed. A common perception is that fair assessment applies the same mode of…

The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal…

This paper shows how PARSEL modules help to realize the German standards in practice. After analyzing the disappointing results of the TIMSS- and PISA-studies, which caused a kind of "PISA-shock" in Germany, and looking at school systems of winning nations, several changes have been initiated in the German educational system. The most…

In this qualitative study, that took place in a coeducational government school in Western Australia, I adopt a social-constructivist perspective of learning (Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1986) to examine reading in an elementary classroom. The focus of this article is Nicholas, a grade-7 boy, who was identified as challenged by the literacy…

Current educational policies show a growing tendency towards giving schools more autonomy and internal quality control. Accurate and comparable data on school performances are thus needed. In Flanders, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS-R (Third International Mathematics and Science Study-Repeat) have provided…