In 2020 and 2021, schooling, like many other aspects of life, has been heavily affected by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. During periods of school closure, education systems and schools have often been quick to organise remote support for home-based learning. But several observers have questioned the effectiveness of these schooling surrogates,…

Using IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2019 data, this brief explores the relationship between students' gender, their confidence and achievement in mathematics and science, and their aspirations to pursue careers in these fields. We find that more boys than girls at grade 8 want to have a mathematics- or…

This paper quantifies the learning gain that accrues to 15-year-old students over one year of schooling in 18 countries and economies, where the cohort eligible to sit the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)ISA test overlaps with two distinct school cohorts. School-entry regulations are used as an exogenous source of…

Finland has been widely regarded as one of the most successful education systems in the world. However, recent trends suggest that Finland's considerable achievements may be at risk. The country's performance in international student assessments has been declining over the past decade, as gaps among student groups and levels of school segregation…

Over time international large-scale assessments have grown in terms of number of studies, cycles, and participating countries, many of which are a heterogeneous mix of economies, languages, cultures, and geography. This heterogeneity has meaningful consequences for comparably measuring both achievement and non-achievement constructs, such as…

Prepared for a Strategic Education Governance learning seminar, this working paper analyses the ways in which the Dutch government tried to reach overarching goals in education, in a system characterised by a high degree of distributed autonomy of education institutions and the participation of multiple actors, and consequently a government highly…

This study investigates students' ability to interpret multiple representations consistently (i.e., representational consistency) in the context of the force concept. For this purpose we developed the Representational Variant of the Force Concept Inventory (R-FCI), which makes use of nine items from the 1995 version of the Force Concept Inventory…

This edition of the Brown Center Report marks the tenth issue of the series and the final issue of Volume II. The publication began in 2000 with Bill Clinton in the White House and the Bush-Gore presidential campaign building toward its dramatic conclusion. That first report was organized in a three-part structure that all subsequent Brown Center…

What would be one of the most sensible ways for a country to invest to achieve maximal economic growth? A recent study (Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2011) by economists at Harvard and Columbia Universities shows that better teacher quality results in significantly higher students' lifetime earnings. And investing in public school teachers…

For decades Japan has remained at or near the top of international assessments of student learning; and in the past decade, students in Japan have become more engaged in learning. However, the government aspires to improve learning outcomes even further. "Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons from PISA for…