The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the extent to which the Test of Everyday Attention for Children (TEA-Ch) in isolation and in combination with parent ratings of inattention predicted performance on reading comprehension assessments presented in various formats (question and answer, cloze, and recall) among a non-clinical sample…

By the end of primary school, students are confronted with expository texts known for their high proportion of domain-specific academic vocabulary words. These words usually comprise Greek or Latin roots in their internal structure. Recent findings showed that knowledge of Greek and Latin roots is related to reading comprehension. However, no…

Understanding the role of negative emotionality in the development of executive functioning (EF) and language skills can help identify developmental windows that may provide promising opportunities for intervention. In addition, because EF and language skills are, in part, genetically influenced, intergenerational transmission patterns are…

New changes to the school curriculum by enacting a minimum competency assessment (MCA) with PISA criteria in 2021 have led to confusion over the form of MCA questions among teachers and students due to limited learning resources at schools. This study aimed to produce valid and practical PISA COVID-19 mathematics tasks (PISAComat) potentially…

The OECD's PISA exercise has by now been widely critiqued. Whilst we agree with most concerns, we begin with the assumption that PISA will remain an enduring and powerful feature of the global educational landscape. Even if the PISA test itself were discontinued, a similar large-scale quantitative assessment exercise would soon arise to take its…

This paper investigates how and why test-based accountability (TBA), a global model for education reform, began to dominate educational debates in Norway in the early 2000s, and how this policy has been operationalised and institutionalised over time. In examining the adoption and retention of TBA in Norway, we build on the cultural political…

This study explores the level of congruency between students' ratings of their own emotional and behavioral strengths and difficulties, and their teachers' ratings of these factors, when compared amongst two neighboring countries, Estonia and Finland. Secondly, it investigates the level of agreement between sixth grade students' ratings and their…

The aim of this study is to examine the experiences of students who were prepared for the High School Transition System (LGS) during the pandemic period from the perspective of mothers. The research was planned in the general qualitative research design. Data were collected by interviewing eleven participants on online platforms. A semi-structured…

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, HIPPY expanded geographically to provide services to parents of 601 children zoned to 114 elementary schools during the 2020--2021 academic year, compared to 105 schools during the previous year. Commencing in March 2020, the program was consistently delivered using a hybrid format (face-to-face and virtual), with…

This document contains the technical appendices for the report "Targeted K-12 Funding and Student Outcomes: Evaluating the Local Control Funding Formula." Appendices include: (1) Data Sources and Sample Construction; (2) Estimating Effects on Student Outcomes; (3) Estimating Targeting Using School Site Spending Data; and (4) Supplemental…

The OECD Career Readiness project makes use of quantitative evidence to identify how teenage career-related activities and attitudes are linked with better adult employment outcomes. Review of multiple national longitudinal datasets confirms that teenage experiences of the workplace through part-time working and volunteering are routinely…

This simultaneous replication single-case design study investigated a vocabulary and main idea intervention with an aspect of text choice provided to students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Five middle school students with ASD participated in two instructional groups taught by school-based personnel. Results were initially mixed. These…

This paper compares and contrasts two required building level school violence measures under NCLB, arrests and incidents of well-defined school misconduct acts, across 20 years of Pennsylvania's approximately 3,000 public school buildings. Generally, both arrests for school violence and incidents of school violence are rare events. Over 20 years,…

This study examined the relationship between educational resources and student performance in mathematics and science on the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA). Many countries face educational inequality and achievement gaps between high performing and low performing students. The resources invested in education determine--to a…

Over the past decade Finnish education has been praised worldwide for its students' "amazing" results in the OECD PISA studies. Thousands of pedagogical tourists--including policy-makers, researchers and educators--have visited the country to find out about the reasons behind the success and to borrow, often uncritically and…