While professional development has been emphasised in many countries, few comparative studies have examined the degree of teachers' participation in professional development and its effect on teachers. Using the TIMSS 2007 data, this study analyses to what extent teachers participated in professional development in 50 TIMSS countries and examines…

Computer science has been a discipline for some years, and its position in the school curriculum has been contested differently in several countries. This paper looks at its role in three countries to illustrate these differences. A reconsideration of computer science as a separate subject both in primary and secondary education is suggested. At…

Class size reduction has been viewed as one school mechanism that can improve student achievement. Nonetheless, the literature has reported mixed findings about class size effects. We used 4th- and 8th-grade data from TIMSS 2003 and 2007 to examine the association between class size and mathematics achievement in public schools in Cyprus. We…

The purpose of the paper is to present the framework and design of modules aiming to teach socio-scientific issues and the related pedagogy to pre-service teachers. Specifically, the work presented in this paper is part of the PreSEES project, a Comenius/LLP project with the main aim of engaging elementary and secondary pre-service teachers in…

Intended to promote the innovative use of technology in education and promote educational advances all over the world, this volume brings together 16 best-practice cases on technology-enhanced educational innovations. Experts from Turkey, Tunisia, Cyprus, Italy, Malaysia, China, India and Finland have contributed to these cases, highlighting the…

Background: The dynamic model of educational effectiveness (DMEE) is a comprehensive theoretical framework including factors that are important for school learning, based on consistent findings within educational effectiveness research. Purpose: This study investigates the impact of teacher and school factors of DMEE on mathematics and science…

The ability to imagine a better future and work towards materialising this is "key" to economic development and technological change. Recent research has highlighted the importance graphicacy has in these developments as well as in people's everyday lives; professionally, socially and culturally (Considine, 1987; Stokes, 2002).…

This study describes the development and validation of a Greek-language instrument that can be used to assess grade 10 students' perceptions of their chemistry classroom environment as a means of showing differences between chemistry learning environments in Greece (Attica) and Cyprus. The development of the instrument was based on available…

We have developed an approach for assessing students' understanding about the distinction between science and technology. The assessment approach focuses on a specific aspect of this distinction, namely the different goal pursued by each of the two domains. Based on this approach, we collected data from two sources: two written tests administered…

The purpose of this study was to develop a framework for analyzing and evaluating student-constructed models of physical phenomena and monitoring the progress of these models. Moreover, we aimed to examine whether this framework could capture differences between models created using different computer-based modeling tools; namely, computer-based…

The Eurydice network has been collecting data on instruction time for more than two decades. These data have been published in many Eurydice publications, notably all editions of the 'Key data on Education'. Since 2010, annually updated data on instruction time has been available on the Eurydice website. Since 2013, the Eurydice network has been…

When we refer to scientific knowledge, we, implicitly or explicitly, refer to its three components, namely its conceptual framework, its methodological principles and its cultural aspects. The pendulum is a topic of science teaching and learning where all three of these aspects can be examined with the aim of gaining a holistic appreciation of the…