In large-scale low-stake assessment such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), students may skip items (missingness) which are within their ability to complete. The detection and taking care of these noneffortful responses, as a measure of test-taking motivation, is an important issue in modern psychometric models.…

We indicate the size of family background effects in Sweden, Finland, and Estonia--countries that differ in both the rhetoric and extensiveness of the system-level school choice policies. Family background effect is defined as the dependence of student achievement on family background characteristics, such as parental education, income, and social…

Teacher motivation is one of the factors that affect the realization of the teaching objectives, motivation and academic achievement of student. This study aimed to answer to the question "How is the relation between the students' academic (sciences and mathematics) achievement and teachers' morale/motivation in Singapore, Japan, Finland and…

Despite considerable interest in research and practice in the effect of classroom disciplinary climate of schools on academic achievement, little is known about the generalizability of this effect over countries. Using hierarchical linear analyses, the present study reveals that a better classroom disciplinary climate in a school is significantly…

This paper explores the relationships among attitudes toward mathematics, teaching, and academic achievement in mathematics. Based on the contextual and social nature of academic self-concept, two complementary studies are discussed. The first study from the northeastern United States examined the relationships among these variables in 84 high…

Extensive support for the seemingly paradoxical negative effects of school- and class-average achievement on academic self-concept (ASC)-the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE)--is based largely on secondary students in Western countries or on cross-cultural Program for International Student Assessment studies. There is little research testing the…

In this paper, we analyse the gender differences between the educational performance of 15-year-old children of migrants from specific regions of origin countries living in different destination countries with the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 wave. We study whether this gender difference of migrant pupils deviates…

Living in a single-parent family is negatively related with children's educational performance compared to living with 2 biological parents. In this article, we aim to find out to what extent the context of the school's share of single-parent families affects this negative relationship. We use pooled data from the Organisation for Economic…

Background: While existing evidence strongly suggests that immigrant students underperform relative to their native counterparts on measures of mathematics, science, and reading, country-level analyses assessing the homogeneity of the immigrant achievement gap across different factors have not been systematically conducted. Beyond finding a…

Does the government control of school systems facilitate equality in school quality? Whether centralized or localized control produces more equality depends not only on what "could" happen in principle, but also on what does happen in practice. We use the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) database to examine the…

Background: Earlier studies using a double perspective (destination & origin) indicate that several macro-characteristics of both destination and origin countries affect the educational performance of migrant children. This paper explores the extent to which educational system features of destination and origin countries can explain these…

This study, drawing on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009, explored the influences of metacognitive and self-regulated learning strategies for reading on mathematical literacy of adolescents in Australia and Singapore. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses revealed the positive influences of…