This study aims to evaluate the validity and practicality of a discovery-group learning model designed to enhance 21st century skills. The model includes a guidebook, teacher's book, student's book, and assessment sheet. The study involved three main stages: a preliminary study, prototype design, and evaluation. At the time of this article, the…

In large-scale educational assessments, it is generally required that tests are composed of items that function invariantly across the groups to be compared. Despite efforts to ensure invariance in the item construction phase, for a range of reasons (including the security of items) it is often necessary to account for differential item…

Data analysis is a significant methodological component when conducting quantitative education studies. Guidelines for conducting data analyses in quantitative education studies are common but often underemphasize four important methodological components impacting the validity of inferences: quality of constructed measures, proper handling of…

Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are psychometric models developed mainly to assess examinees' specific strengths and weaknesses in a set of skills or attributes within a domain. By adopting the Generalized-DINA model framework, the recently developed general modeling framework, we attempted to retrofit the PISA reading assessments, a…

The OECD is planning to enhance existing PISA assessment instruments in reading, mathematics and science so that they will be more suitable to the context of developing countries. The main purpose of this paper is to identify the main technical issues associated with this aim. The paper reports detailed analysis of the existing PISA item pool and…

The OECD "Programme for International Student Assessment" or (PISA) is one of the largest-scale international efforts that have been launched to assess students' scientific literacy. Such an international assessment would likely exert a profound impact on the science education policies of the participating countries/regions, including…

In response to Barry McGaw's article "The role of the OECD in international comparative studies of achievement", this contribution explores two issues which the author considers closely interrelated. The first issue concerns the quality of the items produced to assess reading skills in the OECD-PISA and OECD-SIALS studies and the…

The first volume of the 29th annual conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education contains plenary lecture and research forum papers as listed below. Short oral communications papers, poster presentations, brief summaries of discussion groups, and working sessions are also included in the volume. The plenary…