The Survey of Adult Skills is a product of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) led by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The Survey of Adult Skills aims to measure the skills needed by adults to participate in society and for economies to prosper. The 2023 survey assessed…

Though teachers in schools are increasingly being asked to take responsibility for the education and training of prospective and practicing teachers, little empirical research has been undertaken into the support that they require to perform their duties effectively. This study provides an international needs analysis of the professional learning…

Background: Physical activity (PA) is considered an important factor affecting academic achievement (AA). Different intensities of PA affect mental engagement (ME), which, in turn, affects AA. However, the role of ME in the relationship between PA and AA remains unclear. Objective: This study aimed to examine the mediating and/or moderating role…

School autonomy has been and continues to be one of the most important education reform strategies around the world despite ambiguity about its theoretical and empirical effects on students learning. We use international data from PISA to test three country-level factors that might account for inconsistent results in prior literature: (1) the…

Reducing the socio-economic achievement gap is a key goal of education policy internationally. Since 2017, the stated intention in Ireland is to use the Pobal HP Deprivation Index to identify schools serving high proportions of disadvantaged students. In spite of this, little published research has compared the performance of the HP index to…

Several studies have been published on disengaged test respondents, and others have analyzed disengaged survey respondents separately. For many large-scale assessments, students answer questionnaire and test items in succession. This study examines the percentage of students who continuously engage in disengaged responding behaviors across…

This qualitative study aimed to explore Turkish and Irish mathematics curricula via TIMSS cognitive domains by way of a comparative investigation of first-grade to fourth-grade learning goals. For this purpose, 500 learning goals from both Turkish and Irish curricula were qualitatively analysed and classified by two experts. The findings of the…

Background: The existence of a multiplier, compositional or social context effect is debated extensively in the literature on school effectiveness and also relates to the wider issue of equity in educational outcomes. However, comparatively little attention has been given to whether or not the association between student achievement and school…

This comparative study investigated the associations between instructional practices and students' reading performance among 10 top performing regions that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018. A nationally representative sample consisting of 80,016 15-year-old students from 5 Asian regions (B-S-J-Z [China],…

This study aims to identify the profiles regarding students' familiarity with information and communication technology (ICT) and their relationships to reading literacy and background variables for high-performing countries in PISA 2018. We distinguished four classes in each of the six countries (Estonia, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland,…

Adaptive science dispositions (epistemology, enjoyment, interest, and self-efficacy) have been shown to be related to schools' science climate and science literacy. School stratification may promote positive linkages among science dispositions, science literacy, and science climate. To examine the association between school stratification and such…

This study uses PISA 2018 data to analyze, from a multinational perspective, whether interest in environmental issues is a determining factor of science literacy. A relational survey model is used as a quantitative research design to analyze secondary data obtained from the PISA 2018 evaluation data of 98,306 students at the age of 15 in 15…

This dissertation in practice explores the intersection of computer science education, specifically computational thinking and programming, with mathematics achievement among 15- year-old students in selected English-speaking countries. The research addresses a gap in understanding whether skills developed through computer science can positively…

Both formative assessment and growth mindset scholars aim to understand how to enhance achievement. While research on formative assessment focuses on external teaching practices, work on growth mindset emphasises internal psychological processes. This study examined the interplay between three formative assessment strategies (i.e. sharing learning…

Background: Evaluations of effectiveness of educational reforms are often based on the level of improvement in student performance from one cycle of a particular assessment to the next. However, improvements in overall performance do not necessarily translate to improved equality. Indeed, improvements that favour certain subgroups of students can…