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…

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…

In recent years, the complexity of post-modern societies has gained increasing attention. In terms of education, the attention involves focusing on how students experience inclusion and meaningful learning, regardless of their ethnic and/or socioeconomic background. These matters are particularly relevant in health and physical education (PE),…

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:…

Despite the fact that bullying has been consistently linked to moral disengagement among schoolchildren, research that distinguishes among the four loci of moral disengagement (cognitive restructuring, minimizing one's agentive role, distorting consequences, and victim attribution) to better understand bullying is scarce. The aim of this…

Exploring students' systems thinking (ST) is essential in enhancing science learning, but existing studies have failed to understand students' ST fully as it relates to ecological issues. This study aimed to fill the aforementioned literature gap by exploring lower-secondary school students' ST regarding ecological issues. The Systems Thinking…

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…

Student-reported quality and coverage of school-based relationships and sex education (RSE) vary, with gender/sexual-minority and disadvantaged students reporting poorer provision. Experience of RSE among younger adolescents is under-explored. We examined student-reported RSE coverage and priorities and how coverage, and sexual-health knowledge…

In this cross-national study, we explore the different ways of reasoning-and-proving (RP) presented in three 8th grade textbooks, one from each country: Turkey, Norway, and Slovakia. While the analysis revealed that all three textbooks contain similar numbers of problems involving some form of RP, differences exist in terms of the dominating ways…

One way to increase people's positive behaviors toward nature is to ensure that students gain environmental ethics attitude concerning environmental issues. In this regard, the current study investigates the 7th and 8th-grade students' environmental ethics attitude levels in relation to some variables (grade level, gender, school type). The study…