International studies like PISA use context student or school questionnaires to collect data on student family background, attitudes and learning context. Questionnaire constructs are typically measured using dichotomous or Likert-type items. Scaling of questionnaire items in order to obtain measures of family background, student attitudes or…

One of the most salient requirements for international educational research is the use of comparable measures. For the comparison of student performance across countries the use of item response theory (IRT) scaling techniques facilitates the collection of cross-nationally comparable measures. But there is also a need for valid and comparable…

Discusses steps taken to attain cultural relevance and appropriateness in the reading literacy construct, and in the stimulus materials and items that operationalize it. Explains the influence of multilingual considerations on the development of the reading literacy assessment instrument and notes psychometric procedures used to maximize the…

Attending academically selective schools is intended to have positive effects, but a growing body of theoretical and empirical research demonstrates that the effects are negative for academic self-concept. The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), based on social comparison theory, posits that equally able students will have lower academic…

Through a rigorous process of selecting educational psychology's most useful affective constructs, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) constructed the Students' Approaches to Learning (SAL) instrument, which requires only 10 min to measure 14 factors that assess self-regulated learning strategies, self-beliefs,…

In this article, we examine the construct and criteria validity of student and teacher ratings as indicators of instructional features. As parsimonious measures, student and teacher reports are frequently used to assess aspects of the learning environment. From a methodological perspective, however, both approaches have been questioned. Whereas…

The first volume of the 29th annual conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education contains plenary lecture and research forum papers as listed below. Short oral communications papers, poster presentations, brief summaries of discussion groups, and working sessions are also included in the volume. The plenary…