Across the globe, linguistically heterogeneous populations increasingly define school systems at the same time that developing the ability to communicate cross-culturally is becoming essential for internationalized economies. While these trends seem complimentary, they often appear in paradoxical opposition as represented in the content and…

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…

Although female students' overall performance in mathematics is on a par with the performance of male students, female students tend to report lower levels of mathematics self-concept (MSC) than their male schoolmates. With the present study, we examined for the first time whether occupational gender diversity (i.e., a balanced gender ratio) in…

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…

Using classical and quantile regression analyses, we investigated whether predictor variables for early reading comprehension differed depending on language background and ability level in a mixed group of 161 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) children in second grade (6--8 years). Although L2 readers scored lower on oral language skills and…

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,…

Individual student success is influenced by the educational environment and student characteristics. One adaptation of the educational environment to improve student success is the introduction of continuous, or in-course, assessment. Previous research already identified several student characteristics that are related to student success as…

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…

The impact of socio-economic background on mathematics performance in England can be seen from the most to least disadvantaged. As socio-economic background of pupils increases, so does average mathematics performance; the gap between the most and least disadvantaged is equivalent to over three years' of schooling. However, many factors other than…