The aim of this study was to investigate the comparability of feedback across culturally diverse countries by assessing the measurement invariance in PISA 2015 data. A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis showed that the feedback scale implemented in PISA 2015 was not invariant across countries. The intercepts and residuals of the factor model…

Disciplinary climate and opportunity to learn (OTL) are considered as effectiveness-enhancing factors that can improve mathematics achievement. In this study, we investigated whether the school-level aggregation of student-reported OTL could yield reliable and valid measures, and then explored the relationships among disciplinary climate, OTL, and…

The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has become one of the key studies for evidence-based education policymaking across the globe. PISA has however received a lot of methodological criticism, including how the test scores are created. The aim of this paper is to investigate the so-called 'conditioning model', where…

The unification of South Korea and North Korea is a plausible idea yet it requires a comprehensive preparation in advance. As a method to achieve fiscal efficiency in public services, decentralization theory is consistently applied. However, the current literature and political reality argue that decentralization does not always hold its…

Patience and risk-taking -- two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making -- are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and…

The OECD's Programme of International Student Assessment known as PISA, including the Gender Report published in 2015, is a well-received project and its findings keep being transferred into educational policy development. Its quantitative methodology and the sheer volume of data gathered from around 5,100,000 students from 65 countries seem to…

This article examines whether the way that PISA models item outcomes in mathematics affects the validity of its country rankings. As an alternative to PISA methodology a two-parameter model is applied to PISA mathematics item data from Canada and Finland for the year 2012. In the estimation procedure item difficulty and dispersion parameters are…

We examined Differential Item Functioning (DIF) and the size of cross-cultural performance differences in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 mathematics data before and after application of propensity score matching. The mathematics performance of Indonesian, Turkish, Australian, and Dutch students on released items was…

This study investigates the multivariate relationships among socioeconomic factors, special education coverage (SEC), and reading across countries participating in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Three socioeconomic factors were considered: (a) gross national income per capita, (b) income inequality via the Gini index, and…

Since there is limited research on the applicability of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) model in educational contexts, the current cross-national comparison study aimed to investigate how non-cognitive factors, specifically, the TPB model components, affect students' math outcomes in USA and their peers in three other countries, Germany,…

Many arguments have been advanced in the context of the predictive correlation between learning strategies and reading achievement. There is insufficient understanding, however, of the subtle ways in which different types of learning strategies (i.e. memorisation, elaboration and control strategies) function in facilitating students' reading…

The article reports the results of a cross-country educational research project that uses quantitative methods to identify school leadership practices and contextual characteristics that contribute to explain student achievement in Chile, considering international comparisons. The results question previous evidence about a common repertoire of…

This study examines the data of students from Finland (n = 8,829) and Turkey (n = 4,848) who participated in the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The purpose of this study is to discern whether the use and availability of information and communication technologies (ICT) at home and at school have a differential impact on…

Teachers' classroom behaviors and their effects on student learning have received significant attention from educators, because the quality of instruction is a critical factor closely tied to students' learning experiences. Based on a theoretical model conceptualizing the quality of instruction, this study examined the characteristics of…

In this paper, we develop an information distortion model (IDM) of social class differences in self-beliefs and values. The IDM combines psychological biases on frame-of-reference effects with sociological foci on ability stratification. This combination is hypothesized to lead to working-class children having more positive math self-beliefs and…