This study aims to identify the profiles regarding students' familiarity with information and communication technology (ICT) and their relationships to reading literacy and background variables for high-performing countries in PISA 2018. We distinguished four classes in each of the six countries (Estonia, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland,…

This dissertation in practice explores the intersection of computer science education, specifically computational thinking and programming, with mathematics achievement among 15- year-old students in selected English-speaking countries. The research addresses a gap in understanding whether skills developed through computer science can positively…

We conducted three preregistered studies using the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data to provide a worldwide estimation of the standardized test gap between students from lower and higher social classes. We investigated: (a) the degree to which academic anxiety…

Continuing efforts have been made in the United States (US) to examine the role of schooling in alleviating the ethnic/racial inequalities in student performance. Using the US data from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), this study examines the between-school and within-school racial/ethnic differences in opportunities…

This issue of Snapshots explores how student effort may vary depending on the perceived stakes of the assessment. We revisit the self-reported levels of effort that students invested in the PISA test and compare them with the effort they indicated they would have made if the results counted towards their school marks. Australia's results are…

This research was conducted in Turkey and it examined the relationships between fifteen-year-old students' PISA 2018 literacy scores and student-level and school-level variables. This study aimed to examine the relationships between students' hindering, teachers' hindering, socioeconomic status, parental support and student achievement. The…

In large-scale assessments, performance differences across different groups are regularly found. These group differences (e.g., gender differences) are often relevant for educational policy decisions and measures. However, the formation of these group differences usually remains unclear. We propose an approach for investigating this formation by…

Access to data from the 2022 PISA creative thinking assessment (PISA CT) provides a unique opportunity to advance our understanding of gender differences in creativity. However, in addition to the general theoretical and methodological considerations discussed elsewhere in this special issue, there are several matters specific to gender…

Researchers have conducted numerous studies on the positive effects of intrinsic motivation to learn mathematics and the negative impact of mathematics anxiety on students' performance in mathematics literacy. The study examined how the introduction of cognitive activation in mathematics lessons, a mediator variable, would alter these effects…

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the…

Using the nationally representative sample from the United States in the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (N = 7,429 students from 240 schools), I examined the relationship between teacher instructional practices and student mathematics achievement. To account for the multilevel structure of the data with students nested within…

Most studies suggest that students develop computational thinking (CT) through learning programming. However, when the target of CT is decoupled from programming, emerging evidence challenges the assertion of CT transferability from programming. In this study, CT was operationalized in everyday problem-solving contexts in a learning experiment (n…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of missing data imputation methods, namely regression imputation (RI), multiple imputation (MI) and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) on differential item functioning (DIF). In this regard, the datasets used in the research were created by deleting some of the data via the missing completely at random…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) student questionnaire, despite being designed for low cognitive demand, may induce test burden due to its 306-item length, resulting in increased item nonresponse toward the questionnaire's end. Using the PISA 2018 response data from 80 countries and a cross-classified mixed effects model,…

Creativity is the driving force of technological innovation and sustainable economic growth in the knowledge society. A central question, therefore, is how education helps to enhance creativity. As East Asian countries occupy the top of performance tests such as the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it is most important…