Purpose: Past research shows the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect (BFLPE; negative effect of school-average achievement on student-level academic self-concept) to generalize across countries. However, such evidence is largely limited to math and science. Given that reading self-concept is highly differentiated from math and science self-concepts and…

Efficiency in reading component skills is crucial for reading comprehension, as efficient subprocesses do not extensively consume limited cognitive resources, making them available for comprehension processes. Cognitive efficiency is typically measured with speeded tests of relatively easy items. Observed responses and response times indicate the…

The purpose of this research is to examine the comparability of mathematics and science scores for students from English language backgrounds (ELB) and non-English language backgrounds (NELB). We examine the relationship between English reading proficiency and performance on mathematics and science assessments in Australia, Canada, the United…

In the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, the Flemish community of Belgium outscored its French community in reading, with low achievers accounting for a large proportion of the score gaps. In this study, between-community comparisons based on the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method showed that the Flemish community benefits…

In this article, the change in examinee effort during an assessment, which we will refer to as persistence, is modeled as an effect of item position. A multilevel extension is proposed to analyze hierarchically structured data and decompose the individual differences in persistence. Data from the 2009 Program of International Student Achievement…

Gender gaps in academic achievement have long captured the attention of educational researchers. Although studies from laboratory experiments have reported relatively consistent gender differences in cognitive skills over the decades, investigations done in schools have uncovered dramatic changes. In the United States, educational studies from the…