In the last few years, international student mobility has been disrupted not only by the global health crisis resulting from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic but also adversely affected by the rise of geopolitics. The worsening relationship between China and its western counterparts led by the United States and its allies has significantly…

In this increasingly competitive global society, the expectations held by parents for children's academic success have grown more intense. Despite the established research indicating a positive association between parental expectations and children's academic outcomes, the extent to which these expectations influence children's socioemotional…

The Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) has instigated domestic policy debate aimed at improving education systems' quality and efficiency. Its high performers are often described as knowledge-based legitimation tools that have become reference societies. This article analyses if and the extent to which PISA affects the choice of…

What is the explanation for American students' comparatively mediocre academic performance? "A Mirror for Americans" finds part of it in how they are taught in primary schools. Comparisons with East Asian teaching are supplied by 50 years of research findings. Grove asks not that we copy East Asian teaching approaches, but that we use…

In recent decades, the pursuit of excellence, broadly defined as high educational achievement, has shaped the education systems and the research agendas of many countries across the world. Schools have been encouraged to provide a world-class quality education, with an emphasis on outstanding performance for some students, alongside a general…

Scientific literacy is a central aim of science education. The "Programme for International Student Assessment" (PISA) provides a measure of secondary students' scientific literacy and reported science instruction in 72 countries. Researchers have analyzed PISA data to identify important relationships between science instruction and…

Comparative international assessments of academic achievement consistently indicate that US students trail behind many peers, particularly those from east Asia, in math and science. Traditional efforts to explain this finding have focused on identifying characteristics that might differentiate the United States from top-performing countries.…

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is an international comparative study that measures trends in mathematics and science achievement at the 4th and 8th grades every 4 years. TIMSS is designed to align broadly with mathematics and science curricula in the participating education systems and, therefore, to reflect…

This paper describes the theory of professional competence in teaching of mathematics developed through a cross-cultural examination of teaching practices of mathematics teachers recommended as competent by their principals in two selected high-achieving high schools of India and the United States. A detailed study of teacher cases from both of…

This article examines the extent to which parental socioeconomic status (SES) affects the likelihood of a child becoming a top-performing student, offering an international perspective by reporting this relationship in 31 developed countries. The impact of 3 important educational system characteristics (differentiation in terms of early tracking,…

East Asian dominance in international large-scale assessments is widely known. This is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, exam-oriented education systems in East Asia, wherein students partake in a fierce competition for limited college entrance. Although achievement scores may be comparatively higher, the argument goes, the…

Reports on the low achievement of African American students tend to focus on Black-White achievement gaps. This study draws from official reports that also consider within-race achievement differences. An argument is presented that within-race comparisons are likely to reveal important causal factors that may go unnoticed when between-race…

In this report, the authors examine the extent to which states' current (or planned) accountability systems for elementary and middle schools attend to the needs of high-achieving students, and how these systems might be redesigned under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to better serve all students. In their view, states can and should take…

The admissions process used today in America's most selective colleges and universities is a classic case of interest group politics gone awry. Nobody champions or fights for smart, low-income students. The result is an admissions process reduced to a series of "preferences." Taken together with other widely-used admissions practices,…

Academically resilient students are those students who are academically successful, despite coming from the socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds that have typically predicted poorer educational outcomes. These students are an important group to study because if policymakers can understand what factors may have contributed to their…