A secondary analysis of PISA 2018 data was conducted to investigate the reading achievement of students with an immigrant background. While prior research suggests the importance of demographic characteristics in secondary PISA analyses, a major critique is that PISA centers destination characteristics over origin ones, limiting the study of the…

The purpose of this research is to determine whether PISA 2018 mathematical literacy test items show a differential item functioning across countries. For this purpose, only the items in booklet number three were examined using the MIMIC method with Latent Class Analysis (LCA) approach. PISA 2018 tests are mostly developed in English. Therefore,…

This study seeks to explore the effect of tools of school governance advanced by the global reform agenda (1) on student performance and (2) on reducing the effect of sociodemographic variables on this performance. To do so, we compare two Nordic welfare states with an egalitarian tradition: Sweden and Finland. The Swedish school system has…

School autonomy has been and continues to be one of the most important education reform strategies around the world despite ambiguity about its theoretical and empirical effects on students learning. We use international data from PISA to test three country-level factors that might account for inconsistent results in prior literature: (1) the…

The purpose of this study is to examine the predictive effects of epistemological beliefs about science and informal reading of scientific texts on students' future-oriented optimism on the issue of climate change. Future-oriented climate change optimism is defined as encompassing "hope" and "anticipation" about the climate…

The main purpose of this study was to explore major factors at student and teacher/school levels affecting middle-school students' science self-efficacy among countries with high science academic performance levels in PISA 2015 data by using various regression algorithms of machine learning and multilevel latent profile analysis (MLPA). Out of…

Information and communications technology (ICT) is now widely used in education. However, the effect of ICT on the development of students' scientific higher-order thinking skills (S-HOTS) is a controversial issue in science education research. This has attracted significant attention from researchers worldwide in the field of educational…

Background: Teaching quality is assumed to be an essential prerequisite for student learning outcomes such as mathematics confidence and mathematics achievement. Notwithstanding its significance, empirical research examining the relations between teaching quality and learning outcomes is still limited, particularly among primary school students.…

Many education systems aim to provide learning opportunities to all students regardless of their backgrounds in order for them to realise their potential. Education systems are expected to break down barriers to social mobility. However, too often, children are not given enough opportunities to succeed, to pursue their interests, or to develop…

Since 2000, the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has tested 15-years-olds throughout the world in reading, math, and science. Developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, and administered every three years, PISA is designed to yield evidence for governments on which education policies…

Several studies have been published on disengaged test respondents, and others have analyzed disengaged survey respondents separately. For many large-scale assessments, students answer questionnaire and test items in succession. This study examines the percentage of students who continuously engage in disengaged responding behaviors across…

In all years of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in primary mathematics education, Finland ranked in the lower places (44-61) in the dispersion index (the difference in scores between the 95th percentile and the 5th percentile), while Israel ranked in the upper places (1-3) in the same index. In the last PISA test, Israel…

Formative assessment has been long emphasised as a powerful means for enhancing science learning. However, there is still a lack of research to investigate the impacts of formative assessment on both students' motivational beliefs and behaviours in science learning. This study examined such impacts using data from six Western and six East Asian…

Teacher-student interactions are crucial in understanding the role of a supportive climate in instructional practices. The present study investigates the perceptions of 15-year-old Nordic students regarding four aspects of their science class: teacher support, fairness, feedback, and class discipline. Multilevel modelling analysis is used to…

This study examines longitudinal associations among reading skills, math skills and emotional well-being in a Finnish sample (n = 586) followed from the end of comprehensive school (Grade 9, age 15-16) to age 20. In particular, we determine whether the associations between skills and well-being are mediated by self-concept beliefs. In Grade 9, the…