International large-scale assessments provide cross-national data on students' cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics. A critical methodological issue that often arises in comparing data from cross-national studies is ensuring measurement invariance, indicating that the construct under investigation is the same across the compared groups.…

Academic resilience refers to students' capacity to perform highly despite a disadvantaged background. Although most studies using international large-scale assessment (ILSA) data defined academic resilience with two criteria, student background and achievement, their conceptualizations and operationalizations varied substantially. In a systematic…

International large-scale assessments and comparisons (ILSAs) in education have become significant policy phenomena. How a country fares in these assessments has come to signify not only how a nation's education system is performing, but also its future prospects in a global economic "race". These assessments provoke passionate arguments…

Several recent, highly influential comparative studies have made strong statistical claims that improvements on global learning assessments such as PISA will lead to higher GDP growth rates. These claims have provided the primary source of legitimation for policy reforms championed by leading international organisations, most notably the World…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed impressive machinery to produce international comparative data across more than 70 systems of education and these data have come to be used extensively in policy circles around the world. In many countries, national and international comparative data are used as the…

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] is a global policy organization that includes the United States and about half of the Western Europe countries. It administers international comparison tests, called Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), for 15 year-old students in Mathematics and other subjects. I…

Background: Low-stakes assessments do not have consequences for the test-takers. Currently, motivational research indicates that a lack of test-taking motivation can decrease students' performance in low-stakes assessments. However, little research has explored the domain-specific and situation-specific aspects of motivation simultaneously.…

The ranking of the United States in major international tests such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is used as the driving force and rationale for the current educational reforms in the United…

Stanford education professor Martin Carnoy examines four main critiques of how international test results are used in policymaking. Of particular interest are critiques of the policy analyses published by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Using average PISA scores as a comparative measure of student achievement is misleading…

This article deals with 15-year-old students' tendencies to consider a future science-related career. Two aspects have been the focus of our investigation. The first is based on the construct called "future science orientation", an affective construct consisting of four Likert scale items that measure students' consideration of being…

The idea that America was being harmed because its schools were not keeping up with those in other advanced nations emerged after Sputnik in 1957, took a firm hold on education policy when "A Nation at Risk" appeared in 1983, and continues today. Policy makers justify this concern by pointing to evidence showing that, for individuals…

Through a rigorous process of selecting educational psychology's most useful affective constructs, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) constructed the Students' Approaches to Learning (SAL) instrument, which requires only 10 min to measure 14 factors that assess self-regulated learning strategies, self-beliefs,…