Purpose: Given the unclear relationship between cognition and affect, this article reports on a study exploring how the conative variable of values may provide some explanation for students with excellent performance despite a negative attitude toward mathematics. Design/Approach/Methods: The study reported in this article represents Korea's…

It is well-documented that academic achievement is associated with students' self-perceptions of their academic abilities, that is, their academic self-concepts. However, low-achieving students may apply self-protective strategies to maintain a favorable academic self-concept when evaluating their academic abilities. Consequently, the relation…

East Asian students consistently top comparative assessments of academic achievement. Yet, rather than attempting to develop more sophisticated understandings of this difference, the most common reaction is to attribute East Asian performance to longer study hours and/or the attendance at schools focused on academic skill enhancement and test…

It is well established that family socio-economic status (SES) is strongly related to academic performance. Nonetheless, there is a group of children with high levels of academic achievement who come from disadvantaged family backgrounds. These children possess what is called 'academic resilience'. In our study, we want to see whether the two…

Every teacher's classroom practice is embedded in a system of overlapping contexts that interact with their day-to-day decisions. In this paper, I focus on sociocultural context and how it interacts with teachers' subjective responses to accountability instruments. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in Finland and Singapore --…

Are U.S. and, in particular, Hoosier students competitive and ready to succeed in an ever-changing and increasingly global economic landscape? This question is frequently considered by K-12 education stakeholders at all levels, including national, state, and local officials. One of the central ways in which education systems can compare themselves…

America is not Singapore and Singapore cannot be America. So why are we often comparing ourselves to high-performing countries based on international exams? Despite the educational crisis many U.S. schools are facing, Americans should be cautious not to mimic another country's model within our diverse classrooms. We are largely grounded on the…

One of the important differences between educational systems from different countries is the age at which students are placed into separate tracks. We examined the effects of the age at which tracking occurred on student achievement in a comparative perspective, making use of recent waves of three internationally standardized student assessments…

A large body of research has demonstrated a big-fish--little-pond effect (BFLPE) by showing that equally able students have lower academic self-concepts in high-ability schools than in low-ability schools. Although the BFLPE generalizes across many countries, it varies significantly between countries. The reasons for this variation are still…

The Government is committed to ensuring that the new National Curriculum compares favourably with the curricula in the highest performing jurisdictions, and sets rigorous requirements for pupil attainment which measure up to the highest standards set internationally. The Government is also committed to slimming the National Curriculum so that it…