Emirati children's reading skills have consistently lagged behind global standards on international standardized tests. Given the United Arab Emirates's Vision 2031, which aims for a world-class education system, and given the importance of Arabic literacy in preserving national identity and cultural heritage, there is an urgent need to…

Background: The global outbreak of the novel COVID-19 virus presented a significant threat to students' well-being across the globe. In this paper, we construct a measure of student psychological distress related to COVID-19 disruption. We then examine the variation in students' psychological distress as a function of student demographic…

This paper explores student and school level factors associated with 15-year-old students' reading performance in five Southeast Asian (SEA) countries. It investigates predictors of reading performance, including student gender, economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS), social well-being, and experiences of bullying at the student level. It…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has become the world's largest comparative assessment of academic achievement. While hundreds of studies have examined the factors predicting student achievement in PISA, a comprehensive overview of the main predictors has yet to be completed. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic…

This study explored the influence of early literacy and numeracy skills on fourth-grade math achievement using the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The study utilized valuable information collected by TIMSS about context related questionnaires such as home resources for learning, early literacy and numeracy…

In Ireland, while, on average, students have performed well on national and international assessments of mathematics and science, the low proportions of high achievers in these subjects are noteworthy. Given these patterns and the multifaceted benefits in individual and societal terms that expertise in mathematics and science has been associated…

The study of the territorial difference in educational achievement is a widely debated topic, in particular in Italy for the presence of the well-known strong regional disparities. National and international large scale assessments confirmed that the main characteristic of the Italian school system is the geographical cleavage between North and…

This study investigated the status of equity in mathematics education in Hong Kong based on data from TIMSS 2011 to 2019 and the changes in education equity across the three cycles. The effects of various student-, family-, and school-level variables on students' mathematics achievement were examined and compared using multilevel modeling. Results…

Previous research on the relationship between students' home and school Information and Communication Technology (ICT) resources and academic performance has shown ambiguous results. The availability of ICT resources at school has been found to be unrelated or negatively related to academic performance, whereas the availability of ICT resources at…

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…

The aim or the present study was to examine the relative importance of financial education in school and families and dispositional factors (competitiveness, work mastery, meta-cognition) in predicting financial literacy among Finnish adolescents. The data on the 4328 Finnish 15-year-olds was drawn from the PISA 2018 assessment. Financial literacy…

Background: This study aimed to identify motivation and home influence factors that predict reading literacy achievement of grade 4 students in Abu Dhabi. It drew on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2011 data, which placed Abu Dhabi students' results substantially below the international benchmark of 500. Methods:…

Socioeconomic status (SES) is considered a major predictor of student and school achievement. In most cases, SES is not malleable or available for manipulation to improve students' learning and achievement. Therefore, we explored other student and school-related factors that may be malleable to reduce achievement differences between students and…

The present paper investigates the power of personality to predict important life outcomes in the context of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). On the most global level, personality can be described by the Big Five dimensions, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and…

The number of studies addressing issues of inequality in educational outcomes using cognitive achievement tests and variables from large-scale assessment data has increased. Here the value of using a quantile regression approach is compared with a classical regression analysis approach to study the relationships between educational outcomes and…