In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators and policymakers have scrambled to assess the impact on student learning. Popular metrics that have gained traction are the notions of "years of learning lost" or "months behind," which attempt to quantify the educational setbacks caused by the pandemic. The allure of these…

Tingir et al. (2017) concluded from their meta-analysis that the subject areas taught through mobile devices had significantly higher achievement scores (d = 0.48) than the ones taught with traditional teaching methods. Given the relatively high positive effect of mobile devices on student achievement, we carefully analysed the selected research…

Background: We examine the sensitivity of the Heyneman-Loxley Effect to the influence of an error-prone family background measure in 15 education systems from Southern and Eastern Africa. Our aim is to revisit a claim by Abby Riddell from the November 1989 issue of the "Comparative Education Review" concerning the reliability of family…

Recently in this journal, Sciffer, Perry, and McConney (2020) argued that school socioeconomic-background (SES) compositional effects are important for both research and policy. In response, this commentary argues that realistic school SES effects can only be identified in properly specified models. Otherwise, the estimated school effects are very…

The present study examined the metric properties of the Delaware School Climate Survey -- Student (DSCS-S) using a sample of 1524 Serbian high school students. Of the total number of participants, 764 were male and 760 were female with age ranging from 16 to 20 years (M = 17.67, SD = 0.65). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated that a…

The study investigated hurdles to the quality of student learning assessment by examining issues related to assessment procedures and practices, learners and learning, learning resources and test constructs, and test admin and feedback. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from two Ethiopian universities using two types of…

Academic Self-Efficacy for Self-Regulated Learning (ASE for SRL) represents individuals' belief in their abilities to regulate and organize their learning to achieve academic outcomes, and it is crucial for motivation and students' well-being. This study, conducted on a nationally representative sample of 26,564 10th grade Italian students (50.1%…

Modest correlations between teacher-assigned grades and external assessments of academic achievement (r = 0.40-0.60) have led many educational stakeholders to deem grades subjective and unreliable. However, theoretical and methodological challenges, such as construct misalignment, data unavailability and sample unrepresentativeness, limit the…

The certainty of response index (CRI) measures respondents' confidence level when answering an item. In conjunction with the answers to the items, previous studies have used descriptive statistics and arbitrary thresholds to identify student knowledge profiles with the CRIs. Whereas this approach overlooked the measurement error of the observed…

Lord's paradox arises from the conflicting inferences obtained from two alternative approaches that are typically used in evaluating the treatment effect using a pre-post test design. The two main approaches for analyzing such data are: (1) to regress the change from pretest to posttest on the treatment indicator (change score approach; CS); (2)…

School climate is an essential ingredient of student well-being and academic success. Although it has been studied extensively, only a few well-validated instruments are available for the assessment of school climate. The aim of this study was to assess the factor validity and measurement invariance of the Socio-educational Environment…

Background/Context: School principals have long played a central role in managing building operations and supervising school employees. Over the past two decades, however, policy developments--including site-based management, external accountability measures, and teacher evaluation systems--have increased expectations that principals also improve…

The Expectancy-Value model has been extensively used to understand students' achievement motivation. However, recent studies propose the inclusion of cost as a separate construct from values, leading to the development of the Expectancy-Value-Cost model. This study aimed to adapt Kosovich et al.'s ("The Journal of Early Adolescence", 35,…

For decades, achievement goal theory has been extensively used, but empirical research still requires a clearer understanding of the underlying factors conceptualized and measured during secondary school periods. In light of the increasing use of longitudinal studies in motivation research, this study aims to investigate the longitudinal…

One major aim of international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) is to monitor changes in student performance over time. To accomplish this task, a set of common items is repeatedly administered in each assessment and linking methods are used to align the results from the different assessments on a common scale. The present article introduces a…