Students in Confucian culture are typically high-achieving on international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS. To explore factors that may explain the high performance of Confucian students, the present study compared the latent subpopulations of school resources and disciplinary climate in two Confucian countries and two Anglo countries. Using…

The objective of the study was to make a comparison among the two countries according to the level of sufficiency of educational resources and to determine the accuracy level at which variables related to educational resources can classify the schools on the basis of countries. Relational survey model was used. The sample group of the study was…

Large-scale international assessments rely on indicators of the resources that students report having in their homes to capture the financial capital of their families. The scaling methodology currently used to develop the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) background indices is designed to maximize within-country comparability…

The present study compared the contribution of familial cultural capital to the reading achievement of 116,508 15-year-old students who participated in PISA 2012 in six Confucian heritage cultures (CHCs) and nine non-CHCs with comparable educational and economic development. The different states of cultural capital examined comprised…

Ibero-America is a land of untapped potential. The region is young, facing a unique demographic opportunity. This demographic bonus opens a window of opportunity for inclusive growth in the region, with equitable and high-quality education being a potential driver of domestic growth to support future progress. The social and economic progress of…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide research project involving schools and students in over 79 countries. It is run by the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], takes place every three years, and is designed to examine how 15-year-olds can apply what they have learned in school to real…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure the efficiency performance of public sector-funded schools in Spain. Design/methodology/approach: Using school-level data from Program for International Student Assessment 2012, cross-sectional models were estimated using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Technical efficiencies of public…

Background: Political devolution occurred in the UK in 1998-99, following many years in which some degree of policy administration had been devolved to the four nations. Since devolution, all four countries of the UK have pursued increasingly divergent education policies. This is true in England in particular, where diversity, choice and…

Successful school leadership is highly contextually dependent. However, few studies focused on the comparisons of school leadership across different countries. Even among the existing studies, comparisons tend to be conducted with the assumption that the underlying factorial structure of the construct is the same. In this study, school principal's…

The present study assesses the performance of 54 participating countries in PISA 2006. It employs efficiency indicators that relate result variables with resource variables used in the production of educational services. Desirable outputs of educational achievement and undesirable outputs of educational inequality are considered jointly as result…

The use of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) across nations, cultures, and languages has been criticized. The key criticisms point to the linguistic and cultural biases potentially underlying the design of reading comprehension tests, raising doubts about the legitimacy of comparisons across economies. Our research focused…

This study examines the roles played by student characteristics, school resources and practices, peer effects, and province fixed effects in accounting for differences in the academic outcomes of private and public high school students. Private high school students score significantly higher than public high school students on reading,…

The PISA project has steadily increased its influence on the educational discourse and educational policies in the now 70 participating countries. The educational debate has become global, and the race to improve PISA-rankings has become high priority in many countries. For governments the PISA-test is a high-stake test. Governments are blamed for…

This study investigates the relative roles of home and school variables in accounting for achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in Australia and New Zealand. Using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] 2009, our findings show that achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous…

This article presents findings from a comparative study of sources of educational disadvantage of immigrant children across 18 OECD countries, which is based the data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The findings show that disadvantaged family background and lack of host-country-specific cultural capital account…