International large-scale assessments, such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), are a crucial source of information for education researchers and policymakers. The assessment also includes a student questionnaire, however, the data can be biased by the differences in reporting behavior between students. In this paper, we…

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students around the world know and can do. This volume -- Volume III, Creative Minds, Creative Schools -- is one of five volumes presenting the results of the eighth round of the PISA assessment. For the first time, in 2022, PISA assessed students' capacity to engage in…

Using panel data from the last five PISA cycles and data on various institutional variables, the role of ICT resources, parents' occupation, school characteristics and institutions in student attainment was explored. The data were collected from 2.5 million students in 94 countries/economies representing more than 140 million students worldwide.…

Asian migrant students are typically considered as educational paragons in the West. They have been shown to surpass other students in standard indicators of educational success. However, viewing this success with a purely ethnic framework is inadequate and essentialising. It conflates the experiences of various groups into a homogenised 'Asian'…

A sizeable literature -- spanning education, sociology and economics -- has investigated the issue of parental school preferences and school choice. A notable gap in the existing evidence base is an exploration of how such preferences differ between mothers and fathers. We present new cross-national findings on this matter, drawing on survey data…

The present study was aimed to investigate whether Finnish and Danish students' math achievement differed and which student-level factors, if any, explained the achievement gaps and whether teacher participation in decision making and teacher morale, among the school-level factors, explained the achievement gaps in Finland and Denmark. To this…

Opportunities for social mobility are generated by education systems designed to alleviate the effects of social origin by providing equality of opportunities and resources. The persistence of the strong association between socioeconomic status (SES) and child's educational achievement and attainment suggests that social origin continues to play…

Finland and Singapore are both top-performing countries in international assessments such as PISA. Finland has been consistently one of the high-achievers regarding not only students' literacy levels but also educational equity. Similarly, Singapore has continuously shown outstanding performance in PISA. It outperformed all the other participants…

The global diffusion of outcome-based accountability in education is contested, with accounts of universal convergence being challenged by perspectives emphasising heterogeneity across different national or local contexts. This study uses data from PISA to explore, firstly, the spatial and temporal diffusion of accountability across OECD…

The literature on the immigrant-native educational achievement gap is suggestive of a better performance of immigrant students in countries practising selective immigration policies. However, the origin of such differences has not been investigated. I considered both important observed characteristics as well as the role of unobservables in the…

The development of the modern nation-state was an inherently centralising process. Education policy and the institutionalisation of mass public schooling played a key role in this process, facilitating industrialisation and the generation of mass loyalty toward the state. In almost all federal systems, however, education policy remained an…

In the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment, students from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taipei, where the classroom disciplinary climate of schools was relatively strict, were top performers in mathematics. In this study, two-level linear analyses showed that the classroom disciplinary climate of schools significantly affected…

It is well established that family socio-economic status (SES) is strongly related to academic performance. Nonetheless, there is a group of children with high levels of academic achievement who come from disadvantaged family backgrounds. These children possess what is called 'academic resilience'. In our study, we want to see whether the two…

Teacher-student relations have a significant correlation with student motivation, academic performance and discipline. For example, the meta-analysis by Hattie (2009) revealed an effect size of d = 0.72 for the effect of relations on achievement, and the meta-analysis by Finn, Schrodt, Witt, Elledge, Jernberg & Larson ("Communication…

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…