Families are active agents in school systems and apply different strategies of educational advantage to help their children succeed at school. These strategies are planned and enacted by families with their children in mind, but they are always a response to the broader education system design. This article explores how through their strategies…

Covariates have been used in mixture IRT models to help explain why examinees are classed into different latent classes. Previous research has considered manifest variables as covariates in a mixture Rasch analysis for prediction of group membership. Latent covariates, however, are more likely to have higher correlations with the latent class…

This article focuses on analysing the effect of educational differentiation policies of OECD educational systems on socioeconomically disadvantaged students, based on data from PISA 2009. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a definition of two subgroups of disadvantaged students: those that achieve high scores, and those obtaining scores…

Not much is known about the ways in which assessment data have actually been used in education policy to date. Understanding the role of assessments in informing system-level decision-making is a first step towards helping stakeholders improve the design and usefulness of assessments. Moreover, this understanding can help to further discussions…

The Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) is a research program that tracks young people as they move from school into further study, work and other destinations. This "User guide" has been developed for users of the LSAY data. The guide endeavours to consolidate existing technical documentation and other relevant information…

The Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) is a research program that tracks young people as they move from school into further study, work and other destinations. This "User guide" has been developed for users of the LSAY data. The guide endeavours to consolidate existing technical documentation and other relevant information…

This report has a simple aim: to present results from international assessments so readers can judge for themselves how American students stack up globally. It's intended to be a stand-alone supplement to the "Education Olympics" web event held between August 8th and August 22nd, 2008 (see edolympics.net). It shows how the U.S. has…

This article examines equity in national systems of education in terms of differences in student outcomes, as measured by mathematics achievement scores on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003. The author uses four measures for assessing equity in student outcomes: (1) the strength of the relationship between student…