Excellence gaps are differences in advanced education outcomes among student groups. This study replicates and extends an earlier study on the prevalence and magnitude of excellence gaps based on student sex and immigrant status using Grade 8 TIMSS data. Data were included for the 12 countries that have participated in each TIMSS administration…

Physical activity in youth is significant as it lays the foundation for a healthier lifestyle. However, in physical education classes, the voice of the student often goes unheard. The purpose of this study was to determine how the perception or preference of physical activity differs by age, gender, and/or ethnicity in a middle school setting.…

Despite a growing body of evidence suggesting that establishing sporting repertoires during youth is intimately related to ongoing participation in sport, little is known about how such repertoires develop during the crucial early teenage years, when the sporting habits that provide a basis for sporting careers take shape. The aim of the study…

Motivated by a curriculum privileging number-based strategies but national tests highlighting students' reliance on standard algorithms, this study analyses 2,216 Danish Grade 3, 6 and 8 students' solutions to various multidigit arithmetic tasks, each designed to elicit shortcut strategies, against background variables including sex, ethnicity and…

This study examines emotional well-being variations among students (n = 13,398) across 5 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Secondary analysis is conducted using data from the "Responses to Educational Disruption Survey" (REDS), which focused on the pandemic experiences, including well-being, of 8th-grade students. The study…

Aspirations and expectations are conceptually and empirically different. Given their differential impact on various educational outcomes, it is expected that they, and consequently their convergence, would be affected by different factors. This study examines the factors leading to high aspirations, high expectations and to their alignment by…

Like most other states, Missouri uses assessments intended to measure whether students are on a pathway to "college and career readiness." The state longitudinal data system now has the capacity to directly test that claim. We make use of 8th-grade assessment (MAP) scores in Math, Science, and Communication Arts for roughly 260,000…

This study aimed to explore if there was a significant difference in student performance in ELA and Math in middle school grades six through eight, pre- and post-COVID-19. This study aimed to identify student performance deficiencies in grades six through eight relating to gender, socioeconomic status, and race. The significance of this study is…

The association between the quality of teacher-student relationships and children's psychological adjustment has been mainly studied in Western countries; however, this research topic is gaining more interest in Eastern countries. Based on attachment theory and empirical evidence, this cross-sectional study examined the relationship between…

We investigated two research questions: which students are more likely to respond inconsistently to mixed-worded questionnaire scales, and which country samples have larger shares of inconsistent respondents? We defined an inconsistent response as strongly agreeing or disagreeing with both positively and negatively worded items of the same scale.…

This study undertakes a comparative analysis of the learning of functions in Japanese and Indonesian curricula. Using praxeology, a primary construct of the anthropological theory of the didactic, this study analyzed how functions are approached in both countries' school mathematics textbooks. The analysis results revealed a noteworthy contrast:…

The tables in this report provide national-level estimates of the extent to which students ages 12-18 enrolled in grades 6-12 experience bullying during school. The tables show how bullying victimization varies by student and school characteristics such as sex, race/ethnicity, grade, household income, region, school locale, school enrollment size,…

An emerging body of research documents a relationship between sleep quantity and delinquency during adolescence. Absent from this line of research, however, is an evaluation of whether the associations between sleep duration and different forms of delinquency vary across periods of adolescence and sex. The current study aimed to address this gap…

This study examined the effect of small class size intervention on student outcomes using reading achievement scores as measured by the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), a standardized, norm-referenced test, while controlling for independent variables inclusive of students' gender, race, socioeconomic status (SES), and environment. This…

This paper explored the critical reading strategies and reading performance of junior high school (JHS) students enrolled in both public and private schools. 628 JHS answered the adapted survey questionnaire developed by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) and a researcher-made reading test. The results revealed that JHS students had a high level of…