Background: Integrated science is a ubiquitous school subject that is an amalgamation of science disciplines; its teaching allows topics to be sequenced in any order and given various degrees of coverage and emphasis in the classroom. Ensuring canonical coherence, which is the logical organization of subject matter for effective instruction is…

International comparisons of student achievement in mathematics and their attitudes towards, confidence with and anxiety to mathematics have a long history. Likewise, detailed international comparisons of teacher education programs have also been conducted. However, the relationship between the teacher education programs and teacher anxiety for…

Conventional wisdom suggests that Latin American countries reformed public education in the 1990s in response to a crisis of coverage and quality. Yet, in terms of access, Latin American countries had achieved relatively high enrollment and completion rates by 1990. With regard to quality, there was simply no high-quality evidence showing weak or…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden's education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected to produce higher-quality education at lower cost, in both independent and public schools. This two-pronged study first examines to what extent the…

The Chinese government has implemented centralised science curriculum standards to change science teaching from a didactic to inquiry-based approach to support all students in acquiring science literacy. Framed through theoretical perspectives of inquiry-based instruction and cultural pedagogy, this study examined the influence and impact of these…

The article examines two key concepts in research on policy borrowing and lending that are often used to explain why and how educational reforms travel across national boundaries: reception and translation. The studies on reception analyse the political, economic, and cultural reasons that account for the attractiveness of a reform from elsewhere.…

The last two decades have seen fast-moving and wholescale changes in the ways that education is now provided in French schools, in the nature of learner assessment, and in the form and scale of system evaluation. Innovation and reform have in part followed international trends, themselves triggered by the global impact of the international…

This study aimed to compare Mathematics and Science programs focusing on TIMSS content domains of Numbers and Biology that produced the largest achievement gap among students from Turkey and the USA. Specifically, it utilized the content analysis method within Turkish and New York State (NYS) frameworks. The procedures of study included matching…

The influences on governments for policy changes in schools range across many agencies, including the political party in power. When policies change, the sources of these influences are not always clear. The project whose work is presented in this special issue examines what these changes look like in terms of the differences in assessment tasks…

We utilised four waves of TIMSS data in addition to the information we have collected on countries' educational systems to examine whether different degrees of standardisation, differentiation, proportion of students in private schools and governmental spending on education influence students' math achievement, its variation and socioeconomic…

In information-rich environments, schools are often presented with a myriad of data from which decisions need to be made. The use of the information on a classroom level may be facilitated if performance could be described in terms of levels of proficiency or benchmarks. The aim of this article is to explore benchmarks using data from a monitoring…

White Paper 5's aim is to provide South Africa's children with a solid foundation for lifelong learning and development. Children need to be nurtured and developed holistically for them to participate efficiently in their democratic society. However, South African students continue to perform poorly in Trends in International Mathematics and…

Germany has relied on its well-established tradition of preparing the workforce through the so-called dual system of practical in-firm training (apprenticeships) and theoretical foundations conveyed by vocational schools. Believing in the high quality of academic school programmes that prepare a small elite for university studies, the German…

Key system challenges identified by the Abu Dhabi Education Council provided the impetus for an aggressive strategic plan as necessary guidance and support for the development of the P-12 education system to contribute to advancing its positioning in the global knowledge economy. For the Abu Dhabi Education Council, the analysis served as a tool…

There has been a major and growing international focus on improving the quality of teaching for decades. In Australia, there have been numerous key national initiatives introduced since 2007 with the aim of improving school, teacher and student performance. These include national testing and reporting of student achievement, national professional…