PISA is an influential international study of the achievement of 15-year-olds. It has a high profile across the devolved nations of the UK, with the results having a substantial impact upon education policy. Yet many of the technical details underpinning PISA remain poorly understood--particularly amongst non-specialists--including important…

Fairness in assessment has become increasingly topical and controversial in recent years. Assessment theoreticians are writing more about fairness and assessment practitioners have developed processes and good practice to minimise unfairness. There is also increased scrutiny by students, parents and the wider public--not only of the fairness of…

Despite the availability of access arrangements for tests and exams for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, many autistic children and young people have low academic achievements. There is also a lack of consensus on what their educational priorities should be and a failure to link their school programmes to longer-term…

This study is part of a larger initiative toward understanding the acculturation of immigrant adolescents using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England 2004-2010 database. A necessary step in using a database for cross-ethnic comparisons is first to verify whether its items and scales are equivalent. I examined item- and scale-level…

Is it possible to compare the results in assessments of mathematics across countries with different curricula, traditions and age of starting school? As part of the iPIPS project, a Russian version of the iPIPS baseline assessment was developed and trial data were available from about 300 Russian children at the start and end of their first year…

Advanced-level (A-level) mathematics is a high-profile qualification taken by many school leavers in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and around the world as preparation for university study. Concern has been expressed in these countries that standards in A-level mathematics have declined over time, and that school leavers enter university or the…

We report here on a comparative study of middle school students' attitudes towards science involving three countries: England, Singapore and the U.S.A. Complete attitudinal data sets from TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 2011 were used, thus giving a very large sample size (N = 20,246), compared to other studies in the…

The purpose of this article is to explore crossing differential item functioning (DIF) in a test drawn from a national examination of mathematics for 11-year-old pupils in England. An empirical dataset was analyzed to explore DIF by gender in a mathematics assessment. A two-step process involving the logistic regression (LR) procedure for…

International large-scale assessments of achievement often have a large degree of differential item functioning (DIF) between countries, which can threaten score equivalence and reduce the validity of inferences based on comparisons of group performances. It is important to understand potential sources of DIF to improve the validity of future…

The aims of this study are (a) to examine the sources of differential functioning by gender via differential bundle functioning (DBF) in mathematics assessment and (b) to use DBF to explore whether the differential functioning displayed is construct-relevant or construct-irrelevant. Three qualitatively different areas, namely curriculum domains,…

The Sutton Trust has always recognised the importance of fair school admissions to improving social mobility. Researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the University of Cambridge, and NatCen Social Research (NatCen), along with David Jesson from the University of York, were asked by the Sutton Trust to investigate entry into…

Early detection of child mental health problems in schools is critical for implementing strategies for prevention and intervention. The development of an effective measure of mental health and well-being for this context must be both empirically sound and practically feasible. This study reports the initial validation of a brief self-report…

Background: In England, there are concerns about boys' under-achievement in reading, and girls consistently do better than boys in national reading tests taken by 11-year-olds. At the same time, there have been accusations of bias in the content of the reading tests. Purpose: This article looks at the performance of boys and girls on the 2008…

The comparability of examinations in different subjects has been a controversial topic for many years and a number of criticisms have been made of statistical approaches to estimating the "difficulties" of achieving particular grades in different subjects. This paper argues that if comparability is understood in terms of a linking…

A 24-item short form of the 96-item Developmental Behaviour Checklist was developed to provide a brief measure of Total Behaviour Problem Score for research purposes. The short form Developmental Behaviour Checklist (DBC-P24) was chosen for low bias and high precision from among 100 randomly selected item sets. The DBC-P24 was developed from…