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 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study are two highly respected studies of school pupils' academic achievement. English policy-makers have been disappointed with school children's performance on these tests, particularly in comparison to the strong results of young people from East…

Curriculum-assessment alignment is a well known foundation for good practice in educational assessment, for items' curricular validity purposes. Nowadays instruments are designed to measure pupils' competencies in one or more areas of competence. Sub-competence areas could be defined theoretically and statistical analysis of empirical data by…

In this paper, we document a study that involved applying a multiple imputation technique with chained equations to data drawn from the 2007 iteration of the TIMSS database. More precisely, we imputed missing variables contained in the student background datafile for Tunisia (one of the TIMSS 2007 participating countries), by using Van Buuren,…

Background: Educators, researchers and policy-makers worldwide continue to struggle to understand the changes needed for improving educational outcomes and attainment for students, particularly in content areas such as mathematics and science that are essential for developing a highly skilled workforce. Given the continuing emphasis on linking…

Although researchers call for inquiry learning in science, science assessments rarely capture the impact of inquiry instruction. This paper reports on the development and validation of assessments designed to measure middle-school students' progress in gaining integrated understanding of energy while studying an inquiry-oriented curriculum. The…

Training preservice teachers to develop a predisposition toward constructivist instruction is a major goal for many faculty in teacher education. One critical attribute of a constructivist teacher is a strong hold on pedagogical content knowledge. This study examined the prior knowledge of preservice science teachers and how that knowledge aligned…