Modular education refers to the division of conventional courses into smaller components or modules. Each module enables students to obtain a partial certificate that can be combined into a qualification. This article evaluates whether modular education, which is widely used in secondary and tertiary education, has been effective in reducing…

Educational research acknowledges the significant challenges faced by racialized minority students at school. This interview-based study examines the experiences of racialized minority students in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region in Belgium, regarding a social science curriculum that addresses the power dynamics and privilege involved in…

While achievement gaps have been well-established, much remains to be understood about the manner and extent to which school leadership either increases or decreases student access to opportunity to learn. The current study uses nationally representative samples of U.S. and Flemish students in Grade 4 from the 2011 Trends in International…

The aim of this report is threefold. Its first section provides an overall sketch of the situation across Europe and the underlying mechanisms for the differences in European countries. The second section focuses on the heterogeneities within each country. It examines the disparities among students in order to understand which of those correlate…

Discussions about social justice imply discussions about higher education. After all, a whole set of literature has illustrated how ethnic minority students face all types of difficulties to become successful at college level. In line with this literature, the present research offers a case study of one Flemish University nested in a growing…

It is well-known that there are large disparities in academic achievement between children of different socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. This study examines the evolution of disparities in literacy skills between adults of different SES backgrounds. It compares countries' patterns in the evolution of disparities in literacy by SES…

This study aims to test stereotype threat theory hypotheses using a pupil survey database from Flemish urban secondary education characterized by a stratified tracking system. We relate these systemic features to stereotype threat effects by adding teacher--pupil relations to our analyses. Our results show that stigmatized groups--ethnic minority…

This article examines the extent to which parental socioeconomic status (SES) affects the likelihood of a child becoming a top-performing student, offering an international perspective by reporting this relationship in 31 developed countries. The impact of 3 important educational system characteristics (differentiation in terms of early tracking,…

The effect of composition may be strong in systems where students are systematically sorted based on their socio-economic background. This paper aims to model the differential effect of class composition on pupils' achievement in Belgium (French-speaking Community), France, Spain and Portugal. Multilevel models are consequently tested on the…

In a recent paper, Reardon found that the relationship between family income and children's academic achievement grew substantially stronger in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. We provide an international context for these results by examining the income-achievement association in 19 other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and…