The demand to incorporate informatics into primary education is seen as a critical necessity both today, and for the future of modern societies. Numerous countries are currently revising their primary education curricula in order to incorporate informatics concepts and computational thinking skills. Although many successful initiatives have been…

Why has large-scale standardised testing attracted such a bad press? Why has pedagogic benefit to be derived from test results been downplayed? The paper investigates this question by first surveying the pros and cons of testing in the literature, and goes on to examine educators' responses to standardised, large-scale tests in a sample of low…

Research has demonstrated that second language immersion is an effective means of facilitating primary school students' second language without undermining competence in their first language. Despite the rapid growth of English immersion (EI) programmes in China, only limited empirical research has been conducted to evaluate students' academic…

PIRLS is an international assessment of reading comprehension at the fourth grade that has been conducted every five years since 2001. In 2011, nationally representative samples of students in 49 countries participated in PIRLS and prePIRLS. Forty-five countries assessed fourth grade students, and some countries participated in one or more of the…

The participation of large numbers of countries in current international assessments involving reading literacy--40 in PIRLS 2006 (administered to students in Grade 4 in primary schools) and 57 in PISA 2006 (administered to 15-year-olds in post-primary schools)--suggests that governments and other bodies find the outcomes to be useful. This…