The students in the US are positioned in the middle among the nations on the international tests of academic achievement. This moderate achievement is a matter of great concern as it reflects the output of the US education system, as well as the input, in terms of human resource, available to the market. One way of probing this moderate…

According to the TIMSS 2015 international study findings, students who enjoy learning mathematics a lot scored much higher (average 61 points) than the students who do not enjoy it a lot. Enjoying learning mathematics is one of the indicators of the construct "intrinsic motivation" towards mathematics, and this type of other constructs,…

This volume offers insights from modeling relations between teacher quality, instructional quality, and student outcomes in mathematics across countries. The relations explored take the educational context, such as school climate, into account. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Trends in Mathematics and…

"Solve for x." While many people first encountered this enigmatic instruction in high school, the last 20 years have seen a strong push to get students to take algebra in eighth grade or even before. Today, concerns about the economy highlight a familiar worry: American eighth-graders trailed their peers in five Asian countries on the…

In modern expectancy-value theory (EVT) in educational psychology, expectancy and value beliefs additively predict performance, persistence, and task choice. In contrast to earlier formulations of EVT, the multiplicative term Expectancy x Value in regression-type models typically plays no major role in educational psychology. The present study…