The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assesses the knowledge and skills in mathematics, reading and science of 15-year-old pupils in countries around the world. PISA is run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and assessment is typically undertaken every 3 years, allowing us to chart how…

Expanding numbers of researchers are focusing on the scale and impact of private supplementary tutoring. Such tutoring is widely called shadow education, since much of its curriculum mimics that of regular schooling. Although shadow education has expanded significantly worldwide and is now recognized to have far-reaching significance, research…

Differential item functioning (DIF) can undermine the validity of cross-lingual comparisons. While a lot of efficient statistics for detecting DIF are available, few general findings have been found to explain DIF results. The objective of the article was to study DIF sources by using a mixed method design. The design involves a quantitative phase…

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare developed a national data standards strategy and implementation plan to enhance the comparability, quality and coherence of information across the Australian education and training sectors, including early childhood education, school education, vocational education and training (VET) and higher…

Recent studies have suggested that the professional training received by general educators does not adequately prepare them to properly implement inclusion-based practices. The idea of inclusion in practice has not significantly changed the situation of teaching pupils with special educational needs (SENs) in mainstream classes. This study's…

In this paper we explore the views and opinions of four secondary education science teachers regarding the teaching of scientific competences. Their views were gathered in the context of a training programme in which they had to design, implement, and assess their own teaching unit for developing students' scientific competences by means of…

This study investigates the relationship between school-level accountability practices and science achievement of 15-year-olds, across four counties: Australia, Korea, Portugal, and the United States. We used PISA 2006 data, since 2006 is the only administration that has focused on science. School-level accountability practices are here defined as…

Monitoring Trends in Educational Growth (MTEG) offers a flexible, collaborative approach to developing and implementing an assessment of learning outcomes that yields high-quality, nationally relevant data. MTEG is a service that involves ACER staff working closely with each country to develop an assessment program that meets the country's…

Research on the achievement of rural and remote students in science and mathematics is located within a context of falling levels of participation in physical science and mathematics courses in Australian schools, and underrepresentation of rural students in higher education. International studies such as the Programme of International Student…

PISA, the OECD's international program of assessment of reading, scientific and mathematical literacy, aims to assess the knowledge and skills that students have acquired at school and their ability to use them in everyday tasks and challenges. It also uses questionnaires to gather data on students' attitudes to learning and the conditions of…

Despite the breadth of coverage and collaboration, few empirical studies have concerned educational background and its implementation in order for scrutinising the reasons for students' high scientific literacy in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 at international level. Rather, many report the data as evidence of successful…

The defectiveness of the effectiveness of the Hungarian general education revealed in the PISA survey appears in the higher education as well. The "Introduction to Informatics" subject has one of the lowest exam results among the students of the College of Nyíregyháza majoring in Computer Program Designer and Teacher of Computer Science.…

This technical report and user's guide is designed to provide researchers with an overview of the design and implementation of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as with information on how to access the PISA 2009 data. This information is meant to supplement that presented in Organization for Economic Cooperation…

This study examined contextual effects in Norwegian 10th-grade students' reports on cognitive and metacognitive strategies when using the Cross-Curricular Competencies (CCC) instrument. The CCC was first administered as the final task in a long (three-hour) testing session in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Program for…

The Program for International Student Assessment 2000 (PISA) is an International Examination that was developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to assess the reading, mathematics, and science literacy of students in participating countries, including the United States. PISA is a two-hour paper-and-pencil…