Background: While highlighting is one of the most common strategies to enhance reading comprehension, little is known about how highlighting behavior and its relationship with performance varies across cultures. Our purpose was to examine whether the use and the success of highlighting prevalence, quantity, and task relevance vary internationally.…

There is a common belief that the more the time students spend in the classroom the more they learn; a conception which has been supported by considerable empirical research. However, most of these studies are correlational, which does not provide solid support for their conclusions. In this research work we intend to go a step further in the…

This study investigates the student- and school-level predictors of reading performance across five top-performing countries in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2021. Utilising a multilevel analysis, the research examines the influence of cognitive development, socio-cultural contexts and educational environments on…

Australia and New Zealand have participated in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment since 2000. Reading literacy was the main focus of the Programme for International Student Assessment in 2000, and at that time both countries' students generally performed well above the…

PIRLS 2016 data from eight education systems were used to examine how teachers from three different language groups differed in their teaching of reading literacy. Teaching reading practices differed substantially between the three linguistic/cultural groups. In English-speaking systems, effective practices for establishing reading literacy seem…

Education is recognised across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a moral imperative and a strategic priority to secure future prosperity and human flourishing. Policymakers have set ambitious targets to join the ranks of the best performing education systems in the world in order to deliver economic success and secure a place on the world…

This article outlines the complexity of reading with understanding, what is required for full and deep comprehension, the state of affairs with regard to reading comprehension in developed countries, possible etiologies for low performances, and suggestions for instruction in specific skills and strategies to improve students' demonstrated…

Over time international large-scale assessments have grown in terms of number of studies, cycles, and participating countries, many of which are a heterogeneous mix of economies, languages, cultures, and geography. This heterogeneity has meaningful consequences for comparably measuring both achievement and non-achievement constructs, such as…

Although International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement-pioneered international large-scale assessment (ILSA) of education is now a well-established science, non-practitioners and many users often substantially misunderstand how large-scale assessments are conducted, what questions and challenges they are designed to…

One of the major imperatives behind the comprehensivisation of secondary education was the belief that postponing the age at which students are tracked in different educational routes would mitigate the effect of social background on educational outcomes. Comparative investigations of large-scale international student achievement tests in…

The paper attempts to investigate the influence of textbooks on the results of international assessments such as TIMSS [Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study] and PIRLS [Progress in International Reading Literacy Study]. It tries to consider the role and impact of school textbooks on PIRLS and TIMSS performance across countries. As…

In PISA 2009, Finland and Singapore were both ranked high among the participating nations and have caught much attention internationally. However, a secondary analysis of the means for Reading achievement show that the differences are rather small and are attributable to spurious precision. Hence, the two nations should be considered as being on…

This article gives a short overview based on the "EU High Level Group of Experts on Literacy" (HLWG) report to address issues and challenges in Europe on improving literacy competencies in schools. Furthermore, an analysis is conducted focusing on the promotion of reading and early literacy skills in schools taking into account…

The aim is to describe the development of achievement in compulsory school in the Nordic countries from the 1960s. The study relies on published results concerning literacy and numeracy from the international large-scale assessments between 1964 and 2012. Among others, the following conclusions are drawn: (1) for most countries, a small but…

Background: The present study investigates what factors related to the school context influence student achievement on TIMSS mathematics tests across countries. A systematic review of the literature on PIRLS, TIMSS, and ICCS was conducted upstream to identify those school, teacher, and classroom factors shown to be useful predictors of student…