The recent PISA mathematics results delivered disappointing news for the United States of America (USA). These results underscored the education system's continuing inequalities. An important question concerns to what extent and to which part of the educational system do these sources of inequality occur? In this paper we use PISA 2012 data merged…

To examine the role of inequality in academic achievement, we analyse a cross-national dataset including data from three cycles from 2012 to 2018 from the PISA, an international assessment of 15-year-old students' math, reading, and science performance. The Gini coefficient and gender inequality index (GII) were used as metrics for a country's…

Educational scholars have argued for fair pedagogical practices in response to the learning needs of diverse students. While pedagogical fairness has been widely advocated, few studies have systematically assessed its impact on student learning, and even fewer have examined pedagogical fairness from a school organisational perspective. To narrow…

In the face of Hong Kong's high grade-retention rates, this study aimed to investigate how Hong Kong secondary schools' grade-retention composition is associated with student performance and socioeconomic inequality in student performance. As the research questions involved analysis at the school and student levels, this study employed…

This article examines the effects of education system types and characteristics on changes in the distributions of literacy and numeracy skills during the upper secondary phase of education and training. Whereas there is a substantial literature on system effects on skills during the primary and lower secondary phases of education, much less has…

This study seeks to explore the effect of tools of school governance advanced by the global reform agenda (1) on student performance and (2) on reducing the effect of sociodemographic variables on this performance. To do so, we compare two Nordic welfare states with an egalitarian tradition: Sweden and Finland. The Swedish school system has…

Cross-national studies on socioeconomic status (SES) achievement gaps have focused on the size of the gap and given less attention to where in the SES distribution the achievement gap tends to be relatively large within a society, and whether this location varies across countries. We estimate the relative size of achievement gaps between students…

This study comprises two meta-analyses conducted to investigate relations between socioeconomic status (SES) and academic achievement, with a focus on macro-level, micro-level, and methodological moderating variables in primary and secondary education. The first meta-analysis is based on 326 empirical studies with 949,699 students from 47…

Many education systems aim to provide learning opportunities to all students regardless of their backgrounds in order for them to realise their potential. Education systems are expected to break down barriers to social mobility. However, too often, children are not given enough opportunities to succeed, to pursue their interests, or to develop…

Cultural reproduction and cultural mobility, two mainstay theories accounting for the role of cultural capital in educational inequality, differ from each other in the way cultural capital is hypothesized to mediate the relationship between family background and educational outcomes (the mediation mechanism) and in the differential returns to…

Background: A variety of studies point to a deterioration of educational equity in Sweden and increasing school segregation with respect to achievement and socioeconomic composition. Some schools are resilient to socioeconomic disadvantages in their student body and demonstrate high levels of achievement. However, little attention has been given…

The academic advantage associated with having a university-educated parent may be intrinsic to that condition or depend on the proportion of university-educated parents in a society. If the latter, the expansion at university level will bring about a decrease in the average performance of children from university-educated families. I capitalize on…

Grouping students in terms of ability and aptitude is assumed to be advantageous, given that high-performing students may be stimulated more while low-performing students may be supported more. However, studies on ability grouping often provide mixed results. Additionally, although ability grouping is a common practice in the Philippines, it has…

This paper aims to analyse the applications for raising students' and schools' academic performance in the context of equal opportunities in education in such countries as Canada, Finland and Singapore with high achievement in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) in 2018 and thus to make recommendations to our country- Türkiye. A…

The long-term benefits of academically selective schools have not been thoroughly explored in the Australian context. This research draws on data from a longitudinal study of Australian young people (n = 2933) and utilises Nearest-neighbour matching techniques to explore whether individuals who attend academically selective schools have better…