International surveys of student achievement are becoming increasingly popular with governments around the world, as they try to measure the performance of their country's education system. The main reason for this trend is the shared opinion that countries will need to be able to compete in the "knowledge economy" to assure the economic…

In national education systems worldwide, teacher quality has become synonymous with education reform efforts, but a more elusive goal is empirically measuring teacher quality. One proposed measure of teacher quality, teacher licensing, also known as certification, is an increasingly ubiquitous component of national education systems and…

The aim of the present study was to examine how different types of tracking--between-school streaming, within-school streaming, and course-by-course tracking--shape students' mathematics self-concept. This was done in an internationally comparative framework using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). After…

To compare college and university student engagement in two countries with different responses to global forces, Canada and the United States (US), a series of hierarchical linear regression (HLM) models were developed to analyse data from the 2006 administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Overall, students in the U.S.…