Cross-national comparisons of educational achievement rely upon each participating country collecting nationally representative data. While obtaining high response rates is a key part of reaching this goal, other potentially important factors may also be at play. This paper focuses on one such issue--exclusion rates--which has received relatively…

This colloquium brings information about a second cycle of OECD's International Early Learning and Well-being Study (IELS) to the early childhood community, and offers a further critique of the approach to comparative research that the IELS embodies.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact on student performance due to participation in the Catapult Learning Intervention program in the Mathematics and Reading services offered in a religious non-public school system in the Northeastern United States from grades K-2. Scaled scores from the NWEA MAP assessments administered at the…

The ongoing debate over the positive effects of a growth mindset on student outcomes has called for investigations into its contextual moderators (see Yeager & Dweck in Am Psychol 75(9):1269--1284, 2020. 10.1037/amp0000794). This study examined the potential moderating role of parental support in the associations of a growth mindset with…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the population invariance of equating functions across country subgroups in TIMSS 2015 mathematics tests in relation to the raw-score distribution, DIF, and DTF. We used equipercentile and IRT observed-score equating methods. The results of the study indicate that there is a relationship between the…

Country differences in response styles (RS) may jeopardize cross-country comparability of Likert-type scales. When adjusting for rather than investigating RS is the primary goal, it seems advantageous to impose minimal assumptions on RS structures and leverage information from multiple scales for RS measurement. Using PISA 2015 background…

The purpose of this study was to discover the relationship between individual student reading levels to mathematics levels utilizing the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, STAAR, scores for third- and fourth-grade students before and after the COVID-19 pandemic school closures. The study had four research questions examining third-…

There is growing concern that some public service providers may be nonprofit in name but not in fact. We consider this issue in the context of nonprofit charter schools, which sometimes subcontract their daily operations to for-profit management organizations. We use unique data from Ohio to study how nonprofit charters' reliance on for-profit…

Background: Mode effects, the variations in item and scale properties attributed to the mode of test administration (paper vs. computer), have stimulated research around test equivalence and trend estimation in PISA. The PISA assessment framework provides the backbone to the interpretation of the results of the PISA test scores. However, an…

Students in Confucian culture are typically high-achieving on international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS. To explore factors that may explain the high performance of Confucian students, the present study compared the latent subpopulations of school resources and disciplinary climate in two Confucian countries and two Anglo countries. Using…

Reviews of social comparison processes in school contexts have concluded that individual differences in propensity to compare with others are likely to be important in the classroom, but that there is a paucity of evidence testing this key proposition. To address this gap, we developed and validated a new measure of propensity to engage in…

In this study, we take a critical look at the degree to which the measurement of bullying and sense of belonging at school is invariant across groups of students defined by immigrant status. Our study focuses on the invariance of these constructs as measured on a recent PISA administration and includes a discussion of two statistical methods for…

One of the primary goals of international large-scale assessments in education is the comparison of country means in student achievement. This article introduces a framework for discussing differential item functioning (DIF) for such mean comparisons. We compare three different linking methods: concurrent scaling based on full invariance,…

The purpose of this study was to determine if a gender-based learning environment fosters academic success for female students. This study was, also, meant to determine if the socioeconomic status (SES) and race of females was a predicting factor for the academic success of females enrolled in single gender learning environments in comparison to…

Due to rapid technological advancement that continues to permeate almost all facets of the education sector, video learning has been explored to enhance performance, but most researchers do not incorporate flipped classroom in mathematical videos, which affects the teaching and learning of the subject in Nigeria. This study checked the…