At a time when the national conversation is focused on lagging upward mobility, it is no surprise that many educators point to poverty as the explanation for mediocre test scores among U.S. students compared to those of students in other countries. If American teachers in struggling U.S. schools taught in Finland, says Finnish educator Pasi…

Educational institutions and governing practices are increasingly augmented with digital database technologies that function as new kinds of policy instruments. This article surveys and maps the landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education and provides two detailed case studies of new digital data systems. The Learning Curve is a…

The main aim of the present study was to carry out an in-depth examination of mathematics underperformance in Greece. By applying a binary multilevel model to the PISA 2012 data, this study investigated the factors which were linked to low achievement in mathematics. The multilevel analysis revealed that students' gender, immigration status,…

This paper reports how the context in which a mathematics item is embedded impacts on students' performance. The performance of Year 10 students on four PISA items was compared with performance on variants with more familiar contexts. Performance was not better when they solved items with more familiar contexts but there was some evidence that…

The present study examines from the contingency opportunities perspective the influence of contextual factors on principals' learning-centered leadership using HLM. Participants were 18,641 school principals from 73 jurisdictions who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009. Results showed that principals were…

This article examines how international differences in age-grade distributions and grade effects contribute to science scores among 27 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. As shown in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, countries vary substantially in the grade distribution of 15-year-olds. The costs…

The main research question of this article is concerned with the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. The authors focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores…

The purpose of this paper is to identify school effects on student performance for tertiary entrance in Australia, taking into account student-level predictors using longitudinal data from the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. It finds that aspects of schooling, such as positive attitudes to school and disciplinary…

Mathematics education has emerged to be of prime importance in the United States, as American students' performance has shown to be consistently and significantly lower than many other nations in the world (Rampey, Dion, & Donahue, 2009; National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.; OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, n.d.).…

Following past researches, student background, learning strategies, self-related cognitions in mathematics and school climate variables were important for achievement. The purpose of this study was to identify a number of factors that represent the relationship among sets of interrelated variables using principal component factor analysis and…

In Spain as in other European countries, policies on school choice have been implemented in tandem with the channelling of public resources into private education. Given the application of public money to private schooling, the primary objective of this paper is to analyse the extent to which Spanish families enjoy equality in their ability to…

The purpose of the study was to comparatively investigate student- and school-level factors affecting mathematics achievement of Korean, Japanese and American students. For international comparisons, the PISA 2003 data were analysed by using the Hierarchical Linear Modeling method. The variables of competitive-learning preference, instrumental…

This article explores the extent to which macro-level characteristics of destination countries, origin countries, and immigrant communities help explain differences in immigrant children's educational achievement. Using data from the 2003 PISA survey, we analyze the mathematical performance of 7,403 pupils from 35 different origin countries in 13…