The report provides a social and historical perspective on how Finland's education system was built and emerged as a high performer in Europe by 2000. In highlighting Finland's strengths, the authors focus on: (1) Finland's long-standing commitment to supporting all of its students as the driver of strong outcomes; (2 the systems's emphasis on…

This paper uses extensive student-level micro databases of three international student achievement tests to estimate heterogeneity in the effect of external exit examinations on student performance along three dimensions. First, quantile regressions show that the effect tends to increase with student ability--but it does not differ substantially…

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a system of international assessments that measures 15-year-olds? capabilities in reading literacy, mathematics literacy, and science literacy every 3 years. PISA was first implemented in 2000 and is carried out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an…

The headline was dramatic enough to cause a ripple in the reading public. "Students who use computers a lot at school have worse maths and reading performance," noted the BBC news article, citing a 2004 study by Ludger Woessmann and Thomas Fuchs (Fuchs and Woessman, 2004). It was not long before the blogosphere took notice. Taking the…

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…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…

In July 2001, the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) agreed to the development of assessment instruments and key performance measures for reporting on student skills, knowledge and understandings in primary science. It directed the newly established Performance Measurement and Reporting Taskforce…