Higher academic performance is almost universally considered a good thing, and most quantitative studies show that performance is positively, although weakly, related to mental health. Simultaneously, however, qualitative studies consistently find that high-performing students and students attending high-performing schools report high levels of…

Turkey is an interesting context to study the applicability of the Expectancy-Value-Theory (EVT), since it is a less well-studied research context with a highly selective, centralised, and competitive education system and a more collectivistic-orientated population. In such a context, well-established factors known to drive students' achievement,…

This quantitative study examines the correlation between international student achievement test outcomes and national competitiveness rankings. Student achievement data are derived from a variation-adjusted, common-scale metric data set for 74 countries that have participated in any of the international mathematics and science achievement tests…

STEM education was a systematic teaching and/or learning process in the STEM fields and a positive correlation existed between STEM education, and the economic prosperity and power of a nation in the globalized world. In recent years, rising concerns have emerged about American STEM education. Many stakeholders wondered that whether the nation has…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to combine seemingly unrelated factors to explain global competitiveness. The study argues that school discipline and education investment affect competitiveness with the association being mediated by educational performance. Crucially, diachronic effects of discipline on performance are tested to demonstrate…

Globalization has unleashed profound changes in education. These include positivistic international school comparisons, a singular focus on schools as drivers of economic development, and the adoption of neoliberal market principles in school. These changes, however, generally go unexamined within the field and literature of global education.…

In the face of global economic recession, the competition and collaboration for innovation and future growth among nations has led to discussions of how young people are being prepared to become the next generation of workers and leaders. Although the U.S. has enjoyed a strong presence among the international community since the turn of the…

This study investigated the predictiveness of preferred learning styles (competitive and cooperative) and classroom climate (teacher support and disciplinary climate) on learning strategy use in mathematics. The student survey part of the Programme for International Student Assessment 2003 comprising of 4633 US observations was used in a weighted…

Pundits and bureaucrats use the results from international tests, particularly the PISA, to make claims about the quality of the public education system in the United States and make policy recommendations. In this article I argue, with evidence, that the scores and rankings from PISA are not important and that they cannot give policy makers or…

Over the past few decades, the figure of the market has clearly made its way into the field of education. For some authors, it represents an alternative to regulation by the public authorities, a different form of co-ordination which is better able to meet the objectives of the education systems. Through a secondary analysis of the PISA 2006…

The literature establishes that education drives economic performance, but the extent that education is associated with a country's competitiveness is empirically untested. Our study analyses Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from 63 countries to ascertain education's role in explaining the competitiveness of a country.…

Background: As an effort to account for disparities in mathematics performance between American and East Asian middle school students, the present research aims to compare the relationship between learning styles (competitive and cooperative) and mathematics performance among middle school students between the USA and the three top-performing East…

In its analysis of data it collected in 2006, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) used a variety of statistical methods to arrive at the 'key findings' that school autonomy, school competition and the public posting of student achievement data were…

This article evaluates the impact of competition on the performance of Italian schools. The study is based on policy experiments developed in 2000 by the Lombardy Regional government which introduced a voucher plan to encourage families to enrol their children in private schools. After this intervention, many other Regions launched similar…

Public-private partnerships are being increasingly supported and advocated for, ideologically and financially, as an approach to educational reform in many countries across the world. Proponents suggest that non-state involvement in the education sector has the potential to bolster international Education for All efforts, improve school…