The National Matriculation English Test (NMET), also known as the Gaokao English Examination, is a high-stakes, large-scale selection test for tertiary education in China, with numerous provinces and regions adopting the standardized national test papers. The validity of the NMET has garnered extensive attention. To verify the NMET's validity, it…

This policy brief examines the long-term outcomes of Texas high school students who graduated via the Individual Graduation Committee (IGC) pathway, a mechanism that permits graduation for students who fail one or two End-of-Course (EOC) standardized exams. Drawing on a matched comparison of students who narrowly failed versus narrowly passed…

Ineffective use of resources and suboptimal management at the school level can detrimentally affect human resource development and labour market outcomes. Therefore, efficiently managing human and physical resources is crucial to transforming school inputs into improved educational outcomes. This study assesses the effectiveness of educational…

This study explores how private tutoring relates to students' transitions to demanding post-compulsory schools and their success there, considering their competencies after tutoring but before the transition. Analyzing PISA and linked register data from Switzerland, we find that students who received private tutoring before the transition are more…

Background: In the context of large-scale educational assessments, the effort required to code open-ended text responses is considerably more expensive and time-consuming than the evaluation of multiple-choice responses because it requires trained personnel and long manual coding sessions. Aim: Our semi-supervised coding method eco (exploring…

There is ongoing debate regarding what performance on the number line estimation task represents and its role in mathematics learning. The patterns followed by children's estimates on the number line task could provide insight into this. This study investigates children's estimation patterns on the number line task and assesses whether mathematics…

This quantitative study aims to determine if there is a relationship between schools that had one-to-one technology programs pre-pandemic, and achievement test score outcomes. The study focused on the twenty-three school districts that had one-to-one programs pre-pandemic in Mississippi, and compared their performance with test scores from…

Like all psychoeducational batteries, the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test, Fourth Edition (WIAT-4) requires independent investigation and analysis. The publisher provides multiple theories to support interpretation of its reading measures. At the word reading level, the battery includes a new Phonemic Proficiency subtest that the publisher…

International large-scale assessments have gained much attention since the beginning of the twenty-first century, influencing education legislation in many countries. This includes Spain, where they have been used by successive governments to justify education policy change. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the PISA 2018 reading scores for…

Profile analysis is one of the main tools for studying whether differential item functioning can be related to specific features of test items. While relevant, profile analysis in its current form has two restrictions that limit its usefulness in practice: It assumes that all test items have equal discrimination parameters, and it does not test…

The advancement of technology has led to a growing interest in assessing scientific inquiry within digital platforms. This shift towards dynamic and interactive inquiry assessments enables researchers to investigate not only the accuracy of student responses ("product data") but also their steps and actions leading to those responses…

In 2014, the OECD-PISA's Governing Board approved the addition of a set of global competence measures to its Programme of Student Assessment. In our paper, we explore whether and how there are discursive shifts between the two framing papers (2016/2018) and what the outcomes are for policy-shaping. To this end, we employ Network Text Analysis to…

This study examines the relationship between instructional quality and mathematics achievement, taking into account socioeconomic status. Data from ten European countries participating in PISA 2012 and 2022 were analysed using the framework of the Dynamic Modelling of Educational Effectiveness. In PISA 2012, instructional quality was defined by…

The COVID-19 pandemic kick-started a new paradigm shift in the way and manner teaching and learning takes place on the global scale due to the lockdown that succeeded in shutting down school activities. As a result, most institutions turned to technology supported e-learning as against the traditional face-to-face teaching and learning in order to…

This study had two objectives. One objective was to assess the psychometric properties of a survey instrument measuring a new latent variable, Academic Culture (AC), combining three observed variables academic press, disciplinary climate and teachers' uses of instructional time. The second objective was to replicate the results of an earlier study…