Gender differences in item nonresponse are well-documented in high-stakes achievement tests, where female students are shown to omit more items than male students. These gender differences in item nonresponse are often linked to differential risk-taking strategies, with females being risk-averse and unwilling to guess on an item, even if it could…

Informed citizenship in the 21st Century requires individuals to be numerate. In Australia, all teachers are expected to attend to numeracy inherent in the subjects they teach. Many teachers, however, find this approach challenging and may not see potential benefits for subject learning. Drawing on lesson vignettes and post-lesson interviews, a…

Purpose: Past research shows the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect (BFLPE; negative effect of school-average achievement on student-level academic self-concept) to generalize across countries. However, such evidence is largely limited to math and science. Given that reading self-concept is highly differentiated from math and science self-concepts and…

Shifting students to a growth mindset can increase their achievements. Nevertheless, only a few studies have been conducted on this topic in developing countries. This study aims to examine the relationship between growth mindset, school context, and mathematics achievement in Indonesia. Using a multilevel model on the PISA 2018 data, this study…

Background: The current study investigates school contextual effects on students' academic self-concept and achievement, that is, peer socioeconomic effect and big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), in four Nordic education systems (i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) and selected Chinese education systems (Hong Kong and…

This study explored science-related variables that have an impact on the prediction of science achievement groups by applying the educational data mining (EDM) method of the random forest analysis to extract factors associated with students categorized in three different achievement groups (high, moderate, and low) in the Korean data from the 2015…

The purpose of the present study was to (a) determine relationships among teacher contextual variables including support and cognitive activation, student motivational beliefs, engagement, and mathematics literacy and (b) to examine whether different types of motivational and behavioral engagement variables act as viable mediators between the…

Given the ongoing development of computer-based tasks, there has been increasing interest in modelling students' behaviour indicators from log file data with contextual variables collected via questionnaires. In this work, we apply a latent regression model to analyse the relationship between latent constructs (i.e., performance, speed, and…

Large-scale international studies offer researchers a rich source of data to examine the relationship among variables. Machine learning embodies a range of flexible statistical procedures to identify key indicators of a response variable among a collection of hundreds or even thousands of potential predictor variables. Among these, penalized…

Global education is often framed in terms of standardised testing that makes comparisons across nations. This is particularly evident with international measures like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-olds in member countries. Images on the PISA website provide representations of education that seem to…

This study critically examines if digital divides, comprising access to and use of information technology (IT) in two spheres (schools and at home), affect student achievement in Confucian heritage cultures (CHCs). The sample comprised 38,158 students from 1030 schools in seven CHCs who participated in Program for International Student Assessment…

Background: A long-standing premise in test design is that contextualizing test items makes them concrete, less demanding, and more conducive to determining whether students can apply or transfer their knowledge. Purpose: We assert that despite decades of study and experience, much remains to be learned about how to construct effective and fair…

Science excellence is associated not only with a student's inherent aptitude but also a range of contextual factors. The objective of this paper was to identify the most important contextual characteristics of top performers in scientific literacy, by simultaneously considering factors at the PISA questionnaire-based student, family, and school…

The paper addresses the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's "Program for International Student Assessment" (PISA) as a public policy instrument, whose worldwide circulation is mediated by processes of reinterpretation, negotiation, and re-contextualization, where national, local, and international agencies intertwine.…

Purpose: Scientific literacy plays an important role in catalyzing science learning in the 21st century. Unfortunately, previous evidence revealed that students' scientific literacy tends to be unsatisfactory. This study investigated the effect of ethnoscience-themed picture books embedded in context-based learning (EthCBL) on students' scientific…