This article explores cross-national differences in the intensity of perceived barriers to adult learning in Europe focusing on the barriers recognised by those not participating and having no intention to do so. This relatively large subgroup has received scant scholarly attention, yet exploring their participation barriers is critical for…

Across the world, community-based youth organizations are engaging youth as partners with adults to promote youth civic development. A sample of 528 youth from the United States, Portugal, and Malaysia were surveyed to explore associations between youth-adult partnership (youth voice in decision making; supportive adult relationships) and two key…

Based on a one-year longitudinal experimental study with 3,782 kindergarten school children across 15 countries, this article examines the association between prayer and happiness. Results show that the post-test scores on the faces scale were higher for the participant group who had taken the prayer lessons vis-à-vis the comparison group.…

The objectives of this dissertation include describing and analyzing the patterns of inequality in ALE participation at both the micro and macro levels. Special attention is paid to social origins of individual adults and their association with two groups of macro-level factors, social inequality (income, education, and skill inequality) and…

In this paper, I examine whether generalized trust and education, as well as social security policies of welfare state institutions matter for cross-national differences in subjective well-being (SWB), because knowledge on this issue is still lacking. For this purpose I integrated the insights of two sociological theories: Social Function…

Grouping similar students together within schools ("streaming") or classrooms ("tracking") based on past literacy skills (reported by parents), family socioeconomic status (SES) or reading attitudes might affect their reading achievement. Our multilevel analysis of the reading tests of 208,057 fourth-grade students across 40…

This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South…

Background: The association between frequent use of certain instructional practices in mathematics and science and learning outcomes in schools in low-, medium-, and high-achieving countries is the focus of this study. It not only looks at teaching practices "that work" (positively associated with achievement) but whether they…