Inequality in the shadow? Cross-national comparisons of the effects of additional instruction on math and science performance based on PISA 2018 data Background Many educational systems worldwide are experiencing a growing demand for shadow education, which often takes the form of outside-school educational activities such as private tutoring…

This paper examines the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) PISA for Schools, a local variant of the more-renowned 'main PISA' test that measures and compares individual school performance on reading, mathematics and science against international schooling systems. Here, I address the governance implications of how PISA…

The aim of this study is to compare students' use of number sense strategies based on their mathematics success levels. Participants were 129 seventh graders from three elite secondary schools in Trabzon. Data were collected through a written examination with 10 problems and semi-structured interviews. Interview data were analyzed by considering…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the degree to which differences were present in reading, mathematics, and both subjects college-readiness for English Language Learners who were enrolled in Texas high schools. In the first investigation, the extent to which English Language Learner boys differ in their…

Identifying schools that are beating the odds--schools that are exceeding academic performance expectations, given the composition of their student body--can lead to promising practices that other schools serving similar populations can implement. Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast & Islands used data on high-poverty high schools in…

Federal regulations indicate that the achievement gap must be closed between subgroups, including the gap between special education and non-special education students. We explored the ways in which achievement trends are influenced by three methods of reporting (cross-sectional, cohort-static, and cohort-dynamic). We also investigated (a) the ways…

South Africa participated in TIMSS from 1995 to 2015. Over these two decades, some positive changes have been reported on the aggregated mathematics performance patterns of South African learners. This paper focuses on the achievement patterns of South Africa's high-performing Grade 9 learners (n = 3378) in comparison with similar subsamples of…

This article presents an Exponential Growth Learning Trajectory (EGLT), a trajectory identifying and characterizing middle grade students' initial and developing understanding of exponential growth as a result of an instructional emphasis on covariation. The EGLT explicates students' thinking and learning over time in relation to a set of tasks…

The Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands conducted this study using data on public high schools in Puerto Rico from national and territory databases to compare methods for identifying beating-the-odds schools. Schools were identified by two methods, a status method that ranked high-poverty schools based on their current observed…

The results of international assessments such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are often reported as rankings of nations. Focusing solely on national rank can result in invalid inferences about the relative quality of educational systems that can, in turn, lead to negative consequences for teachers and students.…

The objective of this paper is to present value-added calculation methods that were applied to determine whether online schools performed at the same or different levels relative to standardized testing. This study includes information on how we approached our value added model development and the results for 32 online public high schools in…

Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. Results of these periodic assessments, produced in print and web-based formats, provide valuable information to a wide variety of audiences. They inform citizens about the nature of students' comprehension of the…

While sport and student-athletes have featured in the Australian education system since compulsory schooling, there has been no analysis to date of the link between academic achievement and elite student-athletes. However, this is in stark contrast to the United States of America (US), where student-athletes have been the subject of sustained…

Because the relationship between computer use and achievement is still puzzling, there is a need to prepare and analyze good quality datasets on computer use and achievement. Such a dataset can be derived from TIMSS data. This paper describes how this dataset can be prepared. It also gives an example of how the dataset may be analyzed. The…

Gender differences in mathematical performance have received considerable scrutiny in the fields of sociology, economics and psychology. We analyse a large data-set of high school graduates who took a standardised mathematical test in Russia in 2011 (n = 738,456) and find no substantial difference in mean test scores across boys and girls.…