We analyse the PISA-reported convergence in the performance of private and public schools in Portugal. When PISA sampling weights are used, the number of students enrolled in those types of schools and specific grades/tracks of study differs significantly from official population figures. To account for those differences, we apply a…

International large-scale assessments provide cross-national data on students' cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics. A critical methodological issue that often arises in comparing data from cross-national studies is ensuring measurement invariance, indicating that the construct under investigation is the same across the compared groups.…

Using a major field test (MFT) is a common method of program assessment. For accurate assessment to take place, however, students must be sufficiently motivated to perform. This paper studies a change in major requirements that associated a major field test to a grade in a political science capstone course. After controlling for possible…

This article introduces the concept of effectivity, which is the power to be effective or to achieve a certain effect to accomplish one's goals, in this case, desired school or life achievement. Giftedness would be better defined and developed in terms of effectivity than in terms of various concepts of ability. The concept of effectivity hinges…

This study aims to explore the effect of cultural capital on the perception of parental involvement policies offered by schools in various countries. Using PISA (2018) data, a multilevel model is implemented for each participant country to adopt a comparative perspective. While the results suggest a complex effect, moderated by idiosyncratic…

The issue of model uncertainty has been gaining interest in education and the social sciences community over the years, and the dominant methods for handling model uncertainty are based on Bayesian inference, particularly, Bayesian model averaging. However, Bayesian model averaging assumes that the true data-generating model is within the…

This study compares latent profiles derived from student subgroups of varying levels of mathematical skills defined by achievement and ability assessment scores. Achievement and ability cut scores for identifying students at both ends of the mathematics spectrum were applied and the resulting latent profiles within each condition were compared.…

The concept of growth mindset has been touted as a promising tool to empower learning, but mixed effects emerge. Growth mindset advocates are calling for more attention to the heterogeneity of growth mindset, namely, the interference of other factors at individual or contextual levels (e.g., teacher variables) with the relationship between growth…

Despite the vital role of well-being on academic achievement, doubts prevail as to what extent and how well-being contributes to students' academic achievement. The present research therefore investigated the relation between well-being and academic achievement using multidimensional measures, while considering self-efficacy as a mediator.…

The present study explores the sources of validity evidence of the mathematics self-concept construct in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022 with a focus on concurrent, discriminant, and predictive evidence. Mathematics self-concept was provided with a single index variable in PISA 2022. Using only the U.S. students who…

In this study, we applied elastic-net logistic regression to explore critical predictors of students' mathematics and science levels using data from eighth-grade students in the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The elastic-net approach, a machine learning based approach combining Ridge and Least Absolute…

This study explored the mediating roles of interest in broad science topics (IBST) on the effects of students' perceptions of teachers' formative assessment on science achievement, using data from PISA 2015. We focused on 9,841 15-year-old students from Mainland (B-S-J-G) China. The results revealed that: (1) a classical suppression effect, where…

Any teaching method may have both strengths and weaknesses concerning student learning outcomes. The current study investigated the moderating roles of student dispositions in the relationship between instructional activity and science literacy performance based on data from the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015. Using…

This study examines how student performance in English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics predicts later college enrollment. The results show a strong and consistent relationship over time: students who score at the highest performance level are more than twice as likely to enroll in college compared with students scoring at the lowest level.…

The "Woodcock-Johnson V" ("WJ V") test evaluates general intelligence and cognitive abilities using the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory framework. While measurement invariance is often tested using structural equation modeling (SEM), few studies have applied exploratory graph analysis (EGA), particularly in intelligence…