Science academic achievement is a key construct for examining students' science learning outcomes. While international comparative assessments like TIMSS and PISA have shown high science achievement of Korean middle school students, there is a lack of comprehensive investigation of factors influencing the achievement using domestic data.…

This study aims to demonstrate the optimal way to determine the cut-off score to be used to interpret the total scores obtained from an achievement test or scale using the Artificial Neural Networks method. To this end, the multiple-choice item responses in the Booklet-11 Mathematics subtest at the 8th grade level in the TIMSS 2015 Turkey sample…

Background: Integrated science is a ubiquitous school subject that is an amalgamation of science disciplines; its teaching allows topics to be sequenced in any order and given various degrees of coverage and emphasis in the classroom. Ensuring canonical coherence, which is the logical organization of subject matter for effective instruction is…

An international survey of geoscience education has been carried out jointly by UNESCO and the International Geoscience Education Organisation (IGEO) to address the question of 'How does school-level Earth science education compare across the globe? The survey gathered data from experts in 51 countries, comprising more than half the global…

Many are concerned about the large decline in K-12 student achievement since 2019. And rightly so, given what it signals about student learning and later life outcomes. Less noted is the pre-pandemic sustained decline in student achievement growth that followed 30 years of increases. We examine the nature of achievement decline as measured by…

The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE) continues its advocacy for Common Core and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a federally funded testing consortium, with the release of a study concluding that Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) performance is not an indicator of…

International comparisons of student achievement in mathematics and their attitudes towards, confidence with and anxiety to mathematics have a long history. Likewise, detailed international comparisons of teacher education programs have also been conducted. However, the relationship between the teacher education programs and teacher anxiety for…

It has long been argued that U.S. states' differential performance on nationwide assessments may reflect differences in students' opportunity to learn the tested content that is primarily due to variation in curricular content standards, rather than in instructional quality or educational investment. To quantify the effect of differences in…

The purpose of this study is to explore elementary educators' perceptions regarding what it means to conceptually understand mathematics, the emphasis teachers place on utilizing evidence-based teaching processes, as identified as effective by National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and how these perceptions influence their…

Conventional wisdom suggests that Latin American countries reformed public education in the 1990s in response to a crisis of coverage and quality. Yet, in terms of access, Latin American countries had achieved relatively high enrollment and completion rates by 1990. With regard to quality, there was simply no high-quality evidence showing weak or…

The authors review the influence of state, national and international large-scale assessments (LSAs) on education policy and research. They distinguish between two main uses of LSAs: as a means for conducting research that informs educational reform and LSAs as a tool for implementing standards and enforcing accountability. The authors discuss the…

Saudi Arabia has expanded access to secondary schooling over the past generation, while also pushing to lift quality. This includes decentralising authority out to principals, equipping them to set higher performance expectations and deploy incentives to attract and retain strong teachers. We find wide variability in the extent to which principals…

The OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 (E2030) project's overall goal is that of looking to the future in terms of how school curricula should evolve given the technological advances and other changes that societies are now facing. Towards that end, the E2030 project centres on the idea that education needs to equip students with the…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden's education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected to produce higher-quality education at lower cost, in both independent and public schools. This two-pronged study first examines to what extent the…

The aim of the study is to compare TIMSS 2011 proficiency levels with the proficiency levels defined by the researchers using cluster analysis for Turkey, Korean, Norway, and Morocco in 4th and 8 th grades in the fields of science and mathematics. Therefore, it is tried to be reached that these cut-off scores for each country can serve the…